CHRIST 
IN MODERN LIFE 



SERMONS PREACHED IN ST. JAMES'S CHAPEL, YORK 
STREET, ST. JAMES S SQUARE, LONDON, 



BY THE C 

Rev. STOPFORD AT BROOKE, M.A., 

HONORARY CHAPLAIN-IN-ORDINARY TO THE QUEEN. 



NEW YORK: 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 

549 & 551 BEOADVAT. 

1872. 




\ 



PREFACE. 



The main thought which underlies this volume is 
outlined in the first two sermons, and is this : that 
the ideas which Christ made manifest on earth are 
capable of endless expansion, to suit the wants of men 
in every age ; and that they do expand, developing into 
new forms of larger import and wider application in a 
direct proportion to that progress of mankind of which 
they are both root and sap. If we look long and 
earnestly enough, we shall find in them (not read into 
them, as some say) the explanation and solution not 
only of our religious, but even of our political and 
social problems. Nor do they contradict the ideas 
which direct scientific research, nor those which have 
been generalised from the results of that research, but 
are in essential analogy with both one and the other. 

In speaking of their first revelation and the manner 
of it, of the Person and Character of Him who sent 
them forth to run swiftly upon earth, of the points, as 
in the case of prayer and immortality, in which they 
seem to come into collision with science, of the way they 
touch political and artistic questions, and finally of the 



iv Preface. 

varied course of modern human life from childhood to 
old age, I have striven to keep my main idea before me 
and to support it by proof, though I have not turned 
aside to insist upon it in direct words. In one word 
I believe, and rest all I say upon the truth, as I think, 
that in Him was Life, and that this Life, in the 
thoughts and acts which flowed from it, was, and is, 
and always will be the Light of the race of Man. 

In writing one is often deceived by half-memories — 
one remembers the thoughts but not whence they have 
been derived ; and I have found since this book went to 
press that in two places at least I am indebted for my 
words to other men — to Meander's c Life of Julian, 5 in 
a passage in Sermon iv., on the civilising influence of 
Christianity, and to Eichte's 6 Vocation of Man,' in 
Sermon xiv., for a portion of the argument from our 
consciousness of Will and its results to the existence of 
a 6 self-active reason and a living Will.' With much 
of Fichte's philosophy I disagree, but beyond, or rather 
within his philosophy there is teaching both on life, 
morality, and religion, which makes him more worth 
the reading of persons troubled by the great spiritual 
questions than any other of the German philosophers. 

Stopfoed A. Brooke. 



London : January 1872, 



CONTENTS. 



SEEMON L 
THE FITNESS OF CHRISTIANITY FOR MANKIND. 

PAGE 

Matt. xiii. 31, 32. — ' Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, 
The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a 
man took, and sowed in his field: which indeed is the least of all 
seeds : but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and 
becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the 
branches thereof '....... '. . . 1 



SERMON II. 

THE FITNESS OF CHRISTIANITY FOR MANKIND. 

Matt. xiii. 31, 32. — 1 Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, 
The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a 
man took, and sowed in his field : which indeed is the least of all 
seeds : but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and 
becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the 
branches thereof ' 17 



SEEMON III. 

THE HIGHER JUDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY. 

Matt. v. 17- — 'Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the 

prophets : I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.' 
Mark xii. 37. — ' And the common people heard him gladly ' . .31 



SEEMON IV. 

JUDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY. 

Luke iii. 17.— ' Whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge 
his floor, and will gather the wheat into his garner ; but the chaff he 
will burn with fire unquenchable ' . . . . . . .47 



VI 



Contents. 



SEEMON V. 

THE CENTRAL TRUTH OF CHRISTIANITY. 

PAGE 

John i. 14.—' And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us ' . 63 

SEEMON VI. 
THE CENTRAL TRUTH OF CHRISTIANITY. 
John i. 14. — • And the "Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us ' .75 

SEEMON VII. 
THE BEAUTY OF CHRIST S CHARACTER. 
Isaiah xxxiii. 17. — ' Thine eyes shall see the King in his beauty ' . 89 

SEEMON VIII. 

THE BEAUTY OF CHRIST S CHARACTER. 
Isaiah xxxiii. 17. — 'Thine eyes shall see the King in his beauty' . 102 

SEEMON IX. 
THE BEAUTY OF CHRIST S, CHARACTER, 
Isaiah xxxiii. 17. — 'Thine eyes shall see the King in his beauty ' .117 

SEEMON X. 

PRAYER AND NATURAL LAW. 

James ir. 3. — ' Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye 
may consume it upon your lusts ' 132 

SEEMON XI. 

THE FORCE OF PRAYER. 

Matt. vii. 7. — ' Ask, and it shall be given you ; seek, and ye shall 
find ; knock, and it shall be opened unto you ' . . . .146 

SEEMON XII. 
IMMORTALITY. 

Luke xx. 38. — ' For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living : for 
all live unto him ' 160 



Contents, vii 

% 

SERMON XIII. 
IMMORTALITY. 

PAGE 

Luke xx. 38. — 'For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living.: for 



all live unto him' 175 

SEEMON XIV. 
IMMORTALITY. 

Luke xx. 38. — ' For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living : for 
all live unto him ' . . .194 

SERMON XV. 
IMMORTALITY. 

Luke xx. 38. — ' For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living : for 
all live unto him ' 213 

SERMON XVI. 
' melencolia: 

Eccles. i. 18. — 'For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that in- 
creaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow ' 230 

SERMON XVII. 
« melencolia: 

Eccles. i. 18. — 'For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that in- 
creaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow ' ...... 243 

SERMON XVIII. 
ART EXPENDITURE. 

John xii. 5. — 'Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred 
pence, and given to the poor? ' 258 

SERMON XIX. 
CHILD LIFE. 

Luke xviii. 16. — 'Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid 
them not : for of such is the Kingdom of God' . . . .275 

SERMON XX. 
YOUTH, AND ITS QUESTIONS TO-DAY. 

Matt, xxviii. 20. — ' Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the 
world' 290 



viii Contents. 
* 



SERMON XXI. 

YOUTH, AND ITS HOPE OF PROGRESS. 

FACE 

Matt, xxviii. 20. — ' Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end af the 



world' . . . . . . . . . 305 

SERMON" XXII. 
THE PRESENTIMENTS OF YOUTH. 

Matt, xxviii. 20. — 'Lo, I am with yon alway, even unto the end of the 
world ' . - . 320 



SERMON XXIII. 
THE MID-DAY OF LIFE. 

Eccles. xii. 1. — ' Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, 
while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou 



shalt say, I have no pleasure in them ' 335 

SERMON XXIV. 
THE AFTERNOON OF LIFE. 

Psalm ciii. 5. — ' Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things ; so that 
thy youth is renewed like the eagle's ' 351 



SERMON XXV. 
THE AFTERNOON OF LIFE. 

Psalm viii. 4, 5. — ' Lord, what is man, that thou art mindful of him ? 
and the son of man, that thou visitest him ? Eor thou hast made 
him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory 



and honour ' 365 

SERMON XXVI. 
THE AFTERNOON OF LIFE. 
Isaiah xxxviii. 15. — 'I shall go softly all my years in the bitterness of 
my soul ' 380 

SERMON XXVII. 
THE GLORY AND WORK OF OLD AGE. 

Luke ii. 29, 30. — ' Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, 
according to thy word : for mine eyes have seen thy salvation ' . 393 



SERMONS. 



THE FITNESS OF CHRISTIANITY FOR MANKIND. 

1 Another parable put lie forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of 
heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and 
sowed in his field : which indeed is the least of all seeds : but when 
it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so 
that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.' — 
Matt. xiii. 31, 32. 

We are told, in one of the Arabian stories which charmed 
our childhood, of a fairy tent which a young prince 
brought, hidden in a walnut- shell, to his father. Placed 
in the council- chamber, it grew till it encanopied the 
king and his ministers. Taken into the court-yard, it 
filled the space till all the household stood beneath its 
shade. Brought into the midst of the great plain 
without the city, where all the army was encamped, it 
spread its mighty awning all abroad, till it gave shelter 
to a host. It had infinite flexibility, infinite expan- 
siveness. 

We are told in our sacred books of a religion given 
to man, which, at its first setting forward, was less than 
the least of all seeds. It was the true fairy tent for the 
spirits of men. It grew till it embraced a few Jews of 



2 The Fitness of Christianity for Mankind. 

every class : and men thought, ' Now it will do no more , 
it can never suit the practical sense of the Roman, nor 
shelter beneath its sway the subtile intellect of the Greek. 
To do one is improbable, to do both is impossible.' 
Curious to say, it did both. It made the Eoman more 
practical; it made the Greek intellect alive again. 
When Rome fell, and during her long decay, some may 
have said : £ This boasted religion may suit civilisation, 
but it can never adapt itself to barbarism.' But it ex- 
panded in new directions to embrace the transalpine 
nations, and took new forms to suit them with an un- 
equalled flexibility. Soon it covered Europe with its 
shadow, and in a continent where types of race are 
oddly and vitally varied, it found acceptance with all. 
It has gone abroad since then, and reached out its arms 
to the Oriental, the African, the American tribes, and 
the islands of the seas. And however small may have 
been its success at present, there is one thing in which 
it differs from every other religion — it has been found 
capable of being assimilated by all, from the wild 
negro of the west coast to the educated gentleman of 
India. I speak of the teaching of Christ, not of un- 
yielding Christian systems ; and nothing is more re- 
markable in that teaching than the way in which it 
throws off, like a serpent, one after another, the sloughs 
of system, and spreads undivided in the world, and 
operates unspent, by its own divine vitality. 

Now it is this extraordinary power of easy expansion, 
this power of adapting itself to the most diverse forms of 
thought, which is one strong proof of the eternal fitness 
of Christianity for mankind. This is our subject. 



The Fitness of Christianity for Mankind. 3 

It has these powers, first, because of its want of 
system. 

Christ gave ideas, but not their forms. We have one 
connected discourse of his, and there is not a vestige 
of systematic theology in it. Nay more, many of the 
statements are so incapable of being grasped by the 
intellect acting alone, and so ambiguous and paradoxical 
to the pure reason, that they seem to have been spoken 
for the despair of systematisers. 

What is one to do with a sentence like this — c Blessed 
are the pure in heart, for they shall see God ' ? We 
cannot make a dogma out of it; we cannot get it 
into a system ; it breaks down under logical analysis. 
6 What is it to be pure in heart ? ' asks some defining 
person ; 6 does it refer to general cleanliness from all 
sin, or freedom from the special sin of unchaste thought ? 
What is it to see God ? Above all, what is God ? That 
question is insoluble, unknowable.' 

We cannot call a teaching systematic which in this 
way leaves aside the understanding unless first in- 
structed by feeling, which appeals first of all to certain 
spiritual powers in man which it declares to be the 
most human powers he possesses. Such phrases have 
no intellectual outlines ; purity of heart has nothing to 
do with the region of the understanding ; God is not 
an intellectual conception. But if man has distinctly 
spiritual emotions and desires, words like these thrill 
him like music. 

Indeed, there is a fine analogy to Christ's words in 
music. It is the least definable of all the arts ; it ap- 
peals to emotion, not to reason. Neither you nor I can 



4 The Fitness of -Christianity for Mankind. 

say of that air of Mozart's that it means this or that. 
It means one thing to me, another thing to you. It 
leaves, however, an indefinite but similar impression 
upon us both — a sense of exquisite melody which soothes 
life, a love of a life in harmony with the impression 
made, and an affection for the man who gave us so 
delicate an emotion. So is it with the words of Christ. 
The understanding cannot define them ; the spirit re- 
ceives them, and each man receives them in accord- 
ance with the state of his spirit. To one these words, 
6 Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God,' 
are solemn with warning, to another they are soothing 
with comfort ; to one they mean battle, to another 
peace; to one they sound like music on the waters, to 
another like the trump of doom* 

Could you define the meaning of Mozart's air, so that 
it should be the same to all, how much had been lost ! 
Could you do the same by Christ's words, what a mis- 
fortune ! To limit them to one meaning would be to 
destroy their life. 

Again, take the paradoxical sayings. c If a man 
smite thee on the one cheek, turn to him the other.' 
Submit that to the criticism of the understanding, 
without permitting spiritual feeling to play upon it, 
and it becomes absurd. Define it accurately, and there 
is either too much or too little left of it. Tell the man 
who has a tendency to fear that he is to take it literally, 
and he becomes a coward on principle ; tell the same to 
another who has military traditions of honour, and he 
says that Christ's teaching is not fit for practical life. 
But do not attempt to define it, let the spirit of each 



The Fitness of Christianity for Mankind. 5 

man explain it to himself, and the truth which is in it 
will work its way. 

There is no doubt, I think, that Christ would have 
refused to explain it. All He would have said, He did 
say : 6 He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.' 

It seems as if Christ distinctly chose indefiniteness 
in certain parts of his teaching, in order to shut 
out the possibility of any rigid system of Christian 
thought. 

Of course there are positive and definite portions of 
his teaching. 6 Do unto others as ye would they should 
do unto you.' 6 Be ye perfect, even as your Father in 
heaven is perfect.' 6 Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.' 
6 Love one another, even as I have loved you.' These 
were definite statements, which appealed to the spirit 
of man, but even in their case Christ never wove them 
into a fixed system of theology, nor hardened them into 
an unchanging mode of practice. 

How was He to systematise aspiration to perfection, 
or define the love of man to man, or explain in limited 
words the passionate desire to be redeemed from the 
moral degradation of sin ? Was He to reply to men who 
asked Him to say what He meant by c our ' in ' Our 
Father'? 

ISTo ; the statements were positive, but they had to do 
with things not knowable by the understanding, not 
definable by the intellect. Therefore, Christ's religion 
can never be made into a system. It will form the basis 
and the life of system after system — it will never be 
itself a system. And, because of this, it has the power 
of expanding with the religious growth of the world, 



6 The Fitness of Christianity for Mankind. 

and of adapting itself to the religious standpoints of 
various nations. 

Men must form syste ms, it belongs to ournature to 
do so. Fifty years did not pass after the death of 
Christ before Christianity was cast into a mould, and 
intellectual propositions formed around it. But even 
then S. Paul cast it into one mould, and S. John into 
one quite different. It was flexible to both, and retained 
in both these men its root ideas and its spiritual in- 
fluence, so that its spirit through S. John had power 
upon the Oriental' and through S. Paul upon the 
"Western world. 

A century afterwards the modes of representing Chris- 
tianity changed, and continued to change from genera- 
tion to generation in that intellectual time, till there 
were as many systems of Christianity as there were 
nations in the Church. Its flexibility was proved to be 
almost infinite. And it has continued so up to the 
present time. It is systematised in three or four forms 
in England at this moment, and they may all have 
perished in a century ; but the spirit of Christ's teach- 
ing will have remained, expanding to suit the new 
thoughts of men, and the progress of the whole nation. 
Therefore, it is contained in the idea of Christianity that 
its outward form should be not only subject to continual 
change, but should even be different at one and the 
same time in different nations. 

Hence, the fighting and opposition of sect to sect which 
has been objected to Christianity is one of those things 
which flow from its very nature. If its founder left 
it unsystematised, it was sure to be systematised in 



The Fitness of Christianity for Mankind. 7 

different ways, and these differences would produce 
contention. Contention is an evil, but it is a less evil 
than the spiritual stagnation which would have followed 
upon a hard and fast system. 

. Moreover, if Christianity was to expand, it was neces- 
sary that its truths should be the subjects of contro- 
versy, that different and opposing systems might place 
now one of its ideas, now another, in vivid light ; so 
that, by the slow exhaustion of false views, it might 
come forth clear at last, unrobing itself as a mountain 
from the mists of the dawn. 

Make any religion into a system, define its outlines 
clearly, and, before long, there will be no movement of 
thought about it, no enthusiasm of feeling, no vital in- 
terest felt in its ideas. It suits the time at which it is 
put forward, but when that time has past, it has nothing 
to say to men. But let system be foreign to it — let its 
original ideas be capable of taking various religious 
forms — and it will have the power of expanding for 
ever, of becoming systematic without ever binding itself 
to system; changing its form not only in every time 
but in every country, and growing in a direct ratio to 
the growth of the world. 

Therefore we say, the original want of system in 
Christ's teaching ensures its power of expansion, and 
that fits it for the use of the Eace, now and hereafter. 

But if this were all, it would prove nothing. There 
must be a quality in a religion destined to be of eternal 
fitness for men which directly appeals to all men, or 
else its want of system will only minister to its ruin. 
And if that quality exist, it must be one which we 



8 The Fitness of Christianity for Mankind. 

cannot conceive as ever failing to interest men, and 
therefore as expanding with the progress of Man. 

We find this in the identification of Christianity with 
the life of a perfect Man. 

What is Christianity? Christianity is Christ — the 
whole of Human Nature made at one with God. Is 
it possible to leave that behind as the race advances ? 
On the contrary, the very idea supposes that the 
religion which has it at its root has always an ideal 
to present to men, and therefore always an interest for 
men. As long as men are men, can they ever have a 
higher moral conception of God than that given to them 
through the character of a perfect Man, and can we 
conceive in centuries to come men ever getting beyond 
that idea as long as they are in the human state ? The 
conception of what the ideal Man is, will change, as 
men grow more or less perfect, or as mankind is seen 
more or less as a vast organism ; but as long as there is 
a trace of imperfection in us, this idea — that perfect 
humanity, that is, perfect fatherhood, perfect love, 
perfect justice — all our imperfect goodnesses — realised 
in perfection, and impersonated in One Being, is God to 
us, can never fail to create religion and kindle worship. 
It is the last absurdity, looking at the root ideas of 
Christianity, to say that it is ceasing to be a religion 
for the race. 

The 'religion of Humanity* and the ( worship of 
Humanity ' considered as a great and living whole, is the 
latest phase into which religion apart from Christianity 
has been thrown. I am unable to see how it differs, so 
far as it asserts a principle, from the great Christian idea. 



The Fitness of Christianity for Mankind. g 

Everything it says about Humanity and our duties to 
Humanity seems to me to be implicitly contained in 
Christ's teaching, and to be no more than an expansion 
of the original Christian idea of a divine Man in whom 
all the race is contained, and who is, ideally, the race. 
But I am far from wishing this new religious idea 
to be set aside as unworthy of consideration, nor do I 
join in the cry which has been raised against it. On 
the contrary, I wish it to be carefully studied, that 
we may get all the good out of it we can, and add 
many of its ideas to our present form of Christianity. 
Most of its positive teaching is Christian in thought 
and feeling, though it denies or ignores other Christian 
ideas which seem necessary for a human religion. It 
would be untrue in a Christian teacher to despise or 
abuse a religion which puts self-sacrifice forward as the 
foundation of practical duty not only among men, but 
among societies and nations. It would be equally 
untrue if I did not say that the refusal to consider 
the existence of a personal God, and the immortality of 
man, will, in the end, make that religion die of starva? 
tion. 

But with regard to the special point in question — the 
worship of a great Being, called Humanity— there is this 
difference, and it is a radical one, between Christianity 
and the religion of Positivism, that the Humanity the 
latter worships is indefinite to the religious emotions, 
while its system is definite to the understanding. It is 
in this the exact reverse of Christianity, which has no 
system capable of being defined by the understanding, 
and possesses a Human Person distinctly defined for the 



io The Fitness of Christianity for Mankind. 

emotions. It is plain that, if what I have said be worth 
anything, the definite system in this religion will be an 
element of death in it and forbid its contemporaneons 
growth with the race. It is no matter of donbt to me, 
that the worship of a Humanity — which it needs an 
active intellectual effort to conceive, and a large know- 
ledge of history to conceive adequately, or which se- 
cludes one sex as a special representative of its ideal, 
— can never stir religious emotion nor awake action 
based on love to it, in the mass of mankind, however 
much it may do so in particular persons. The general 
mass of men require that this ideal Man be con- 
centrated for them into one person with whom they 
can have distinct personal relations, whom they can 
personally love for his love, and reverence for his per- 
fection. It is not easy, knowing mankind as we do 
— seeing its meanness, cruelty, and weakness, as well 
as all its nobility — to represent it to ourselves as an 
object of worship, or to care particularly whether its 
blessing rests on us or not. Than this, it is certainly 
more easy to conceive as an object of worship, God, 
revealed in will and character by a perfect Man ; and 
more simple to think of one Man embodying all the 
Eace than of the" whole Eace as one Man. It is a 
more satisfying thought, to give our love to human 
nature as seen in Christ, without evil, full of perfect 
love and sympathy, both male and female in thought and 
feeling, than to Mankind as seen in history. It is more 
delightful to love men as seen in Him, for the glorious 
ideal they will attain to, than to love them as they are, 
and without a sure hope of their eternal progress ; and 



The Fitness of Christianity for Mankind. 1 1 

that tlie blessing of Christ's perfect Manhood and 
Womanhood should rest upon us, that his love, pity, 
strength, support and peace, should belong to us and 
accompany us ; that He should attend us as a personal 
friend and interest Himself in our lives, till they reach 
the perfection of his life; and that He should be doing 
the same for all our brothers as for us; — does seem 
more fitted to kindle worship and stir emotion than the 
thought that we are parts of a vast organism which 
continues to live, like the body, by the ceaseless and 
eternal death of its parts. 

It may be possible to feel a pleasure in sacrificing 
oneself for the good of this great Being which lives by 
consuming its own children, and to enjoy the thought 
of immortality in its continued progress without ever 
personally realising that immortality. But after all, this 
overshadowing and abstract e Humanity,' which crushes 
us while it moves on, is not attractive, and is more 
likely in the end to create despair and anger than to 
give life to hope and love. 

But the ideal Man in Christ is very different. It 
demands the same self-sacrifice, but it does not an- 
nihilate men. And in itself it is intensely interesting to 
men because it is so perfectly human. Whether men 
are Christians or not, that exquisite life of Christ will 
always attract them ; so true to childhood, youth, and 
manhood; so simple, yet so complex; so womanly, yet 
so manly; in love, in honour and in truth, in noble 
endurance, in resolute will and purity, so ideal, yet 
so real to that which we feel we ought to be, or 
may be, -that there is no possible age of the world in 



1 2 The Fitness of Christianity for Mankind. 

the far-off future, which will not, as long as men are 
human, love that with the love which is worship. 

So the ideal manhood which is at the root of Chris- 
tianity ensures to it a power of expanding with the 
growth of the race ; and this power is one proof at least 
of the eternal fitness of Christ's teaching for mankind. 

The third quality in it which ensures its expansive- 
ness is that it has directly to do with the subjects 
which have always stirred the greatest curiosity, 
awakened the profoundest thought, and produced the 
highest poetry in man. And these are the subjects 
which are insoluble by logical analysis, unknowable 
by the understanding : — What is God, and His relation 
to us ? Whence have we come ? whither are we going ? 
What is evil, and why is it here ? What is truth, and 
is there any positive truth at all ? Do we die or live 
for ever? 

It is the fashion among some to say, c Do not trouble 
yourself about the insoluble and there are those who 
succeed, perhaps, in doing so. Well, I think them 
wrong, as they think me wrong. No one feels more 
intensely than I do the pain of not having things clear — 
the vital torment of a thirst ever renewed, and not as 
yet fully satisfied ; but I had rather keep the pain and 
the thirst than annihilate, as it seems to me, a portion 
of my human nature. I must trouble myself about 
these things, and so must others, and the trouble has its 
source in an integral part of our human nature. We 
must tear away that part before we can get rid of these 
subjects. To deny that this part of our nature exists 
is absurd, to affirm that it has been produced by 



The Fitness of Christianity for Mankind. 1 3 



education in nien, not haying originally been in their 
nature, is to beg the question. What we have to do 
with is what lies before us, and if I were asked what 
is the most universal characteristic of man, that which 
most clearly distinguishes him from the lower animals, 
I should answer, that it was the passion for solving 
what is called the insoluble, the desire of "knowing what 
is said to be unknowable. 

I meet that longing everywhere. There is no history 
which is not full of it. There is no savage nation 
which has learnt the first rudiments of thought, in 
which you do not find it. There is no poetry 
which does not bear the traces of it — nay, whose 
noblest passages are not inspired by it. There is 
scarcely a single philosophy which does not work at it, 
or at least acknowledge it by endeavouring to lay it 
aside. One cannot talk for an hour to a friend without 
touching it at some point, nor take up a newspaper 
without seeing its influence ; and if Christ had started 
a religion for mankind with the dictum, Lay aside 
thinking about these questions, his religion would 
seem to be unfit for men ; it would have shut out the 
whole o£ the most curious part of our being. But He 
did the exact contrary, He recognised these questions as 
the first and the most important. He came, He said, 
for the express purpose of enabling us to solve them 
sufficiently. He said that truth was to be found, that 
God could be known, that immortality was a reality, 
that evil was to be overthrown, that we came from God 
and went to God. 

But to solve these questions and to know God is not 



14 The Fitness of Christianity for Mankind. 

done at once. It is the work of a lifetime. Christ said 
that there were answers to be found ; He did not reveal 
the answers at once. He did not wish to take away 
from men the discipline of personal effort, nor to free 
them from the pain, the victory over which wonld give 
them spiritual strength, the endurance of which would 
make them men. He put them in the way of solving 
these questions for themselves. By asking and seeking, 
by prayer and humility, they were to solve the appa- 
rently insoluble. By doing his will, by living his life of 
holiness, self-sacrifice, and devotion to truth, they were 
at last to know the truth. 

Therefore, because these problems which are called 
insoluble were left by Christ as personal questions 
which every man born into the world must solve for 
himself, human effort after God can never suffer the 
stagnation which complete knowledge would produce 
in imperfect man. Religious emotions, the play of 
feeling and intellect around spiritual things, desire after 
higher good, prayer, active work towards a more perfect 
love and towards the winning of truth, are all kept 
up in us by the sense of imperfect knowledge, imperfect 
spiritual being, and, in addition, by the hope which 
grows stronger through the experience of growth, that 
we shall know even as we are known, and become 
perfect even as our God. 

Remove from religion these difficult questions, and 
the hope and the passion of discovering their answers, 
and I believe that all religious emotions will die, and 
all religion of any kind finally perish in contact with 
the world. 



Tlie Fitness of Christianity for Mankind. 1 5 

It is because Christianity as taught by Christ acknow- 
ledges these questions as necessarily human ; it is 
because it leaves their solution to personal effort, and so 
secures an undying source of religious effort and emo- 
tion ; it is because it promises that those who follow the 
method of Christ, and live his life, shall solve them ; 
that Christianity belongs to men, is calculated to ex- 
pand, to suit men in every age. If so, there is another 
reason which may be alleged for its eternal fitness for 
the race. 

Lastly, if what Christianity says be true, that we shall 
all enter into a life everlasting, these three qualities in 
Christ's religion of which I have spoken are not without 
their meaning or their value to us there. 

That our religion should be without a system, will 
enable us, in a new life and under new conditions, to 
reorganise it without difficulty, to fit it into the new 
circumstances of our being, to use it in novel ways. 

That our religion is a human religion, that it appeals 
directly to human nature, that it is nothing apart from 
mankind, that it is woven up with all the desires and 
hopes and sorrows of men, that it bids us concentrate 
all the race into One Person, and love all men in Him, 
that it throws all our effort and enthusiasm on the 
progress of mankind, these do not belong to this 
world alone. If we live again, we shall live in a higher 
way, in the race ; for we shall live in Christ, not an iso- 
lated life, but a life in all mankind. We shall be more 
united with our fellow-men, more ready to give ourselves 
away to them, more interested in the progress of 
mankind, more able to help. Never, as long as Christ 



1 6 The Fitness of Christianity for Mankind. 

is, can we forget, or cease our communion with, the 
whole world of men. 

And finally, that even after attaining much, enough 
at least to set us in all the peace which is good for us, 
there should remain, as I think there will remain, in the 
eternal life, certain questions which we shall have to solve, 
certain things which man cannot wholly know, it will 
not be an evil but a good thing for us. Eor that there 
should always be things above us and unknown, ensures 
our eternal aspiration, ensures to us the passionate 
delight of ceaseless progress. 



The Fitness of Christianity for Mankind. 1 7 



THE FITNESS OF CHRISTIANITY FOR MANKIND. 

6 Another parable put lie forth unto them, saying, The kingdom 
of heayen is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and 
sowed in his field : which indeed is the least of all seeds : but when 
it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so 
that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.' — 
Matt. xiii. 31, 32. 

Those who love variety of colour and variety of form 
can scarcely reap a deeper pleasure than is his who 
walks slowly through the lower part of one of the 
Italian valleys of the Alps when spring is at its height. 
The meadows are full of flowers, at once so brilliant, 
soft, and manifold of hue, that the grass seems sown 
with dust of rainbows. The grey boulders, which lie 
like castles on the sloping lawns, are stained scarlet and 
gold and bronze with many lichens. Chestnut and 
walnut spread their rich leaves below ; above, the oak 
clusters in the hollow places ; higher still, the pines 
climb the heights in dark battalions. Colour, form, 
development, are all different; each flower, leaf, and 
tree each variety of grass or lichen, has its own 
peculiar beauty, its own individuality. 

It seems impossible to include them all under one 
term, to say that they are all substantially one thing. 
Yet they are all transmuted sunshine. Every fibre, 



1 8 The Fitness of Christianity for Mankind. 

every cell, every atomic arrangement which, enables 
each of them to give us the sensation of red, or violet, 
or what colour lies between these, has been built up 
through means of the force or the forces of the sun- 
shine. Nevertheless, this one original element has 
been modified by the tendency — I use a word which 
but expresses our ignorance — of each seed to assume 
a specialised form at a certain stage in its growth ; to 
be modified by what one would call in mankind its 
character. So that we have two things : one simple 
source of vegetable life, infinite forms and modifications 
of form through which that force is conditioned. 

It is a happy analogy by which to arrive at the idea 
of the one spirit of Christ's life, received and modified 
into a thousand forms by different characters of men, 
and different types of nations. Christianity is like the 
sunshine — not a given form, nor imposing a uniform 
system of growth — it is a force of spiritual heat and 
light, which expands, developes, and irradiates ; a spiri- 
tual chemical force which destroys dead things, and 
quickens half-living things in the character. It is 
assimilated, but according to the original arrangement 
of the spiritual atoms of each character, so that it 
does not destroj^, but enhances individuality ; does not 
injure, but intensifies variety. 

There has scarcely ever lived a single Christian man 
whose Christianity has been identical in form with that 
of another, though the species may have been the 
same. There is certainly no Christian nation which 
has produced a type of Christianity uniform with that 
of another. Look at the Apostolic Church, read the 



The Fitness of Christianity for Mankind. 1 9 

epistles which, remain to us. The letters of S. James, 
of S. Peter, of S. Paul, of S. John, differ as the oak 
differs from the chestnut, as the fir differs from the 
ash-tree. These represent in various forms what the 
sunshine has done for them 5 the epistles represent, in 
various forms of Christian thought, what the spirit of 
Christ had wrought in their authors. 

I venture to say that there never has existed a set of 
religious books which so manifestly despised outward 
consistency, and so boldly fell back upon an inner unity 
of spirit ; which, though they systema/fcised to a certain 
extent, showed more plainly, taken together, that there 
was no system in the source from whence they drew 
their inspiration ; which dared more audaciously to 
vary their modes of expressing spiritual truths, relying 
on, and because of, their appeal to the primary instincts 
of mankind. 

This was one of the elements which we saw last 
Sunday lay at the root of the success of Christianity. 
It left individual and national development free, and 
it appealed to a common humanity. And, having no 
system, it promoted liberty of growth in Mankind, and 
when that growth -had passed a certain stage, and the 
character of the time changed, it changed its form in 
turn to suit the new ideas of men. But beneath all 
these varied representations there will be always a 
few clear principles, and a spirit which will remain 
the same. Whether Christianity exist as Calvinist or 
Ritualist, Roman Catholic or Lutheran, Wesleyan or 
Unitarian, all these forms will have taken their life and 
built up their being from the sunlight of Christ. 



20 The Fitness of Christianity for Mankind. 

It will be easily seen from this, how much I despise 
the struggle for uniformity, and how much I dread it 
as directly anti-Christian. Unity of spirit we should 
endeavour to seek for, and keep in the bond of peace ; 
but uniformity ! Imagine a world in which all the 
trees were pines. 

The effort to establish uniformity is not only the 
note of an uncultivated spirit — it is especially the 
mark of one who has not studied the teaching of 
Christ, nor the teaching of the Apostles. And Chris- 
tianity has been especially unfortunate in the way in 
which for many ages its followers, foolishly dismayed 
by the cry of inconsistency, have made it almost a point 
to struggle against Christ's altogether divine con- 
ception of a spiritual universe of worshippers at one in 
the midst of a boundless variety. Yet, such is the vi- 
tality of Christianity, that it has resisted the very efforts 
of its own children to nullify its qualities, and remains 
as before, a spirit of light and a spirit of life, capable 
of endless expansion, ready to alter its form in order to 
co-operate with every human movement, and working 
out in every human soul who receives it some subtile 
phase of its beauty, some delicate shade of its tender- 
ness, some new manifestation of its graces. 

We have spoken so far of the religion of Christ in 
contact with human character ; let us look at it in 
contact with some great human interests. 

Take politics. Other religions have laid down poli- 
tical systems, and bound themselves to ideas of caste, 
to imperialism, or to socialism. The latest religion 
has woven into its body a most cumbrous arrangement 



The Fitness of Christianity for Mankind, 2 1 



of mankind and the nations of mankind. Conse- 
quently, these religions being tied to the transient, 
perished or will perish with the political systems to 
which they are bound. 

Christianity never made this mistake. It refused to 
be mixed up with any political system, or to bind those 
who followed it down to any form of political union, as it 
had refused to bind them down to any particular form of 
religious union. Leaving itself perfectly free, it could 
therefore enter as a spirit of good into any form of 
government. And it did enter into all forms — patri- 
archal, military, feudal, monarchical, imperial, demo- 
cratic — as a spirit which modified the evils of each, 
and developed their good. It is objected to Chris- 
tianity that it does not touch on great political ques- 
tions, such as the limits of obedience to a ruler, or the 
duties of the State to the citizens, and therefore that 
it is not a religion for men ; but it does not touch 
directly on these questions because its object was to 
penetrate them all as an insensible influence. Had it 
declared itself imperialist or democratic, it would have 
been excluded from the one or from the other. But, 
entering into the hearts of men as a spirit of love, of 
aspiration after perfection, of justice and forgiveness, 
it crept from man to man, till in every nation there 
existed a body of men who had absorbed the spirit of 
Christ, who slowly brought about political regenera- 
tion through spiritual regeneration. 

But because it has prevailed in countries where 
feudal systems and the tyrannies of caste have ruled, 
it has been accused of having been on the side of 



22 The Fitness of Christianity for Mankind. 

oppressors of the race. The objection is plausible, but 
it is unfair. Some distinction is surely to be made 
between a Church made into a political organ and 
Christianity itself. When the Church, as in France 
before the Revolution, became a mere adjunct to the 
throne and threw in its lot with tyrants, it forswore 
its Christianity. When it established itself at Eome 
as a tyranny over men's souls, it turned upon its 
Founder and re-crucified Him. Moreover, if Chris- 
tianity has been accused as the handmaid of oppres- 
sion, it is at least just to look on the other side and 
see if it has not been the inspirer of the noblest 
revolutions. All its fundamental ideas — the Father- 
hood of God, the brotherhood of all men in Christ, the 
equality of all men before God, the individual respon- 
sibility of every human soul, the surrender of all 
things for others, the one necessity of salvation for 
all alike, emperor and peasant — are spiritual ideas 
which bear an easy translation into political ideas, and 
which, gathering strength, have proved the ruin of 
many tyrannies. If Christianity has any close relation 
with a distinct political idea, it is with the idea of a 
high democracy ; and if, as some say, the world is 
irresistibly tending to democracy, there is nothing in 
Christianity to prevent its falling in with this political 
tendency. I see no limit to its expansion, should that 
take place ; on the contrary, I think that it will take 
in democracy a further and a more brilliant, a freer 
and more devotional development than ever it has yet 
done. The atmosphere will be more congenial to it. 
Again, take art. Greek religion lent itself to sculpture, 



The Fitness of Christianity for Mankind. 23 

but after a time its ideas were exhausted. It afforded 
no universal range of subjects. Some way or another, 
human as it was, it was not human enough to enable 
it to last. It was of Greece, it was not of mankind. 

The religion of Mohammed shut out all painting 
and sculpture of living forms from its sacred archi- 
tecture. But the Eomanesque and Gothic builders, with 
a strange instinct that in Christianity there was no- 
thing irreligious, and that every act of human life, if 
done naturally, or for just ends, even if it were such an 
act as war, was a religious act, and that all the world, 
animate and inanimate, was holy to the Lord in Christ, 
filled porch and arcade and string-course with sculpture 
of all things in earth and heaven, symbolised the re- 
volving year, made parables of beauty and of terror, 
and threw into breathing stone the hopes, the passions, 
the fears, and the faith of Christian men. 

This was but one field of the immense space which 
Christianity opened to religious art. JSTo limitations 
were placed upon it by the religion ; it was left to 
each nation, according to its genius, to develope it in its 
own way. 

It was the same with poetry as with architecture ; 
it lost nothing by the addition of the Christian element ; 
it gained, on the contrary, a great subject. And that 
subject, in its infinite humanity, in the way it has of 
making those who grasp it largely interested in all 
things, in the majesty which belongs to it, does not 
prevent men from rising into the grand style — that 
style which makes a man feel himself divine as he 
reads. On the contrary, of the three poets who since 



24 The Fitness of Christianity for Mankind. 

Christ liave possessed this style in perfection, two 
employed all their power on subjects which belonged 
to Christian thought. The majesty of the subject 
reacted on their power of expression. They proved 
at least that Christianity does not exclude, .but is ex- 
pansive enough to include, the art of poetry. More- 
over, a religion which appeals to human feeling, which 
is nothing apart from Man, whose strongest impulse is 
the 6 enthusiasm of humanity,' can never be apart from 
an art like that of poetry which withers, corrupts, and 
dies when it is severed from the interests of men. One 
may even go further. Christianity has to do with the 
insoluble, with visions which love alone can realise, 
with questions to which the understanding gives no 
reply, with feelings which cannot be denned, only ap- 
proached, in words. It is the very realm in which half 
of the poetry of the world has been written. 

There is nothing then to prevent Christianity existing 
in harmonious relation with all true poetry from age 
to age of the world. In itself, it gives a grand subject 
to poetry, and both it and poetry have similar elements ; 
their common appeal to, and their death apart from, 
human. interests and feelings ; their common life in a 
region above the understanding. 

I need not dwell on the arts of music and painting ; 
let us pass on to science. Supposing Christianity had 
committed itself to any scientific statements or to any 
scientific method, it could never have been fitted to ex- 
pand with the expansion of knowledge, to be a religion 
for a race which is continually advancing in scientific 
knowledge. If it had bound itself up with the knowledge 



The Fitness of Christianity for Mankind. 25 



of its time, it would naturally be subject now to 
repeated and ruinous blows. If it bad anticipated tbe 
final discoveries of science and revealed them, nobody- 
would have believed it then, and nobody would probably 
believe it now. Christianity committed itself to nothing. 
6 Yours is not my province, 5 it said to science. 6 Do 
your best in your own sphere with a single eye to truth. 
I will do my best in mine. Let us not throw barriers 
in each other's way. The less we obstruct each other, 
the more chance there is of our finding in the end 
union in the main ideas which regulate both our worlds 
in the mind of God.' 

Foolish men have mixed it up with science and en- 
deavoured to bind each down upon the bed of the other, 
to make science Christian and Christianity scientific, 
but the result has always be£n a just rebellion on both 
sides. The worst evil has been the unhallowed and for red 
alliance of the doctrine of the plenary inspiration of the 
Bible, or of the infallibility of the Church to Chris- 
tianity. The moment science was truly born, war to 
the death arose against a form of Christianity which 
violated the original neutrality of Christianity towards 
the pure intellect and its pursuit of its own truths. But 
get rid of 'this alliance, and how is Christianity in oppo- 
sition to science ? what is to prevent its being a religion 
fit for man in that future when the youngest child will 
know more than the philosopher of to-day ? It is no 
more in actual opposition to science than poetry is. 

The river glideth at his own sweet will; 

I suppose no scientific man would run a tilt at that. 



26 The Fitness of Christianity for Mankind. 

Its thought, its feeling-, the impression it is intended to 
convey, are all out of the sphere of science. Neverthe- 
less, the natural philosopher recognises that it appeals 
to his ' imagination. He receives pleasure from it ; he 
accepts it as true in its own sphere. 

But if he were told that the writer claimed in- 
fallibility for his expression, said that it expressed 
not only a certain touch of human feeling about the 
river, but also the very physical truth about the move- 
ment of the river, he would naturally be indignant. 
6 You have left your own ground,' he would say to the 
poet, 6 where you were supreme, and you have come into 
mine, where, by the very hypothesis of your art, you are 
a stranger. You claim my obedience, here, in my own 
kingdom, the absolute surrender of my reason in a realm 
where reason is the rightful lord. You may be a poet, 
but } t ou are denying the first principles of your art. 5 

Precisely the same might be said to those who are 
ill-informed enough to connect the spirit and life of 
Christianity with efforts to suppress physical science 
or historical criticism as tending to infidelity, or as 
weakening Christian truth. It might be said to them 
by a wise scholar : 6 You may be Christians, but you 
are doing all the harm you can to Christianity. You 
are endeavouring to bind an elastic and expanding 
spirit into a rigid mould in which it will be suffocated. 
You are fettering your living truth to physical and 
historical theories which have been proved to be false 
and dead, and your Christianity will suffer as the 
living man suffered when the cruel king bound him 
to the corpse. Your special form of Christianity will 



The Fitness of Christianity for Mankind. 2 7 

grow, corrupt, and die, for it attacks truth.' But if some 
Christian people have gone out of their sphere, there 
are not wanting philosophers to do the same. c I know 
nothing of God and immortality,' says science, and with 
an air as if that settled the question. 6 1 should think 
you did not,' Christianity would gravely answer ; 6 no 
one ever imagined that you could, but I do ; I do know 
a great deal about those wonderful realities, and I have 
given my knowledge of them to millions of the human 
race who have received it, proved it through toil and 
pain, and found it powerful to give life in the hour of 
death.' 6 Proved it,' answers science, 6 not in my way, 
the only way worth having, the way which makes a 
thing clear to the understanding.' But there are 
hundreds of things which are not and cannot be sub- 
mitted to such a proof. We cannot subject the action 
of any of the passions to the explanations of the under- 
standing. By reasoning alone, we cannot say what an 
envious, jealous, self-sacrificing, or joyful man may do 
next, nor explain his previous actions. One might fa,r 
more easily predict the actions of a madman. 

We cannot give any reason for love at first sight, or, 
what is less rare but as real, friendship at first sight. 
We cannot divide into compartments the heart and soul 
of any one person in the world, saying, This is the 
boundary of that feeling; so far this quality will carry 
the man in life. For the understanding is but a 
secondary power in man. It can multiply distinctions. 
It cannot see the springs of life where the things are 
born about which it makes distinctions. 

Night's candles are burnt ont, and jocund day 
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops. 



28 The Fitness of Christianity for Mankind. 

What tells us that is poetry? The voice of the un- 
derstanding ? ' Night's candles are burnt out,' it says 
— 'it is a ridiculous statement of the fact that the 
stars have ceased to shine. Day never stands tiptoe 
on the misty mountain-tops. Is that poetry? It is 
nonsense.' But the understanding rarely acts alone 
in this way ; a higher power in man proves to him, he 
cannot tell how, that the lines are magnificent poetry — 
nay, that the poetry is in the very passages which the 
understanding despises. 

Let each keep to their own spheres and do their work 
therein. Christianity has no weapons in her original 
armoury which can be wielded against science, and 
science cannot attack spiritual truths with purely in- 
tellectual weapons. No one asks for a spiritual proof 
that the earth goes round the sun ; it is equally absurd 
to ask for a purely intellectual proof of the existence 
of an all-loving Father. And it would be wiser if science 
kept her hands off Christianity. Mankind will bear 
a great deal, but it will not long bear the denial of 
a God of love, the attempt to thieve away the hope 
of being perfect and our divine faith in immortality. 
These things are more precious than all physical dis- 
coveries. The efforts made to rob us of therm, when 
they are made, and they are but rarely made, are 
not to be patiently endured. They are far less tole- 
rable than the ill-advised attempts of Christian men to 
dominate over science. These latter efforts are absurd, 
but the former are degrading to human nature. 

It really does not make much matter to the race in 
genera], whether the whole science of geology were 



The Fitness of Christianity for Mankind. 29 



proved to-morrow to have been proceeding on a wrong 
basis, or whether the present theory of force be trne or 
not ; but it would make the most serious matter to 
mankind, if they knew for certain to-morrow that there 
was no God of justice and love, or that immortality was 
a fond invention. The amount of suppressed and 
latent belief in these truths, which we should then 
discover in men who now deny them, would be perhaps 
the strangest thing we should observe ; but it hath not 
entered into the heart of man to imagine the awfulness 
of the revolution which, following on this denial, would 
penetrate into every corner of human nature and human 
life. 

Both science and Christianity have vital and precious 
truths of their own to give to men, and they can 
develope together without interfering with each other. 
Should science increase its present knowledge tenfold, 
there is nothing it can discover which will enable it 
to close up that region in man where the spirit com- 
munes in prayer and praise with its Father, where 
the longing for rest is content in the peace of for- 
giveness, where the desire of being perfect in unselfish- 
ness is satisfied by union with the activity of the 
unselfish God, where sorrow feels its burden lightened 
by divine sympathy, where strength is given to over- 
come evil — where, as decay and death grow upon the 
outward frame, the inner spirit begins to put forth its 
wings and to realise more nearly the eternal summer of 
His presence, in whom there is fulness of life in fulness 
of love. No; as Christianity can expand to fit into 
the progress of politics, and to adapt itself to the 



30 The Fitness of Christianity for Mankind. 

demands of art, so it can also throw away, without 
losing one feature of its original form, rather by 
returning to its purer type, all the elements opposed to 
the advance of science which men have added to its 
first simplicity. 

It will be pleasant, if what I have said be true, for 
all of us to meet five hundred years hence, and, inter- 
changing our tidings of the earth, to find that the 
thoughts and hopes of this sermon, in which many of 
you must sympathise, have not been proved untrue. 



The Higher Judaism and Christianity. 



3i 



THE HIGHER JUDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY. 

1 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets : I 
am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.' — Matt. v. 17. 

And the common people heard him gladly.'— Mark xii. 37. 

One of the most interesting positions in which a 
Christian teacher can find himself is when, under the 
pressure of new discoveries in science or in history, he 
is forced to change his front and take up new ground 
for either attack or defence of his faith. It has often 
happened that after the army of Christianity has 
defended for many years its cause from a particular 
place of vantage, that place becomes untenable. It is 
the business then of the army to change that position, 
and it almost invariably changes it under a cry from the 
enemy that the Christian cause is overthrown. The 
weaker members of the host itself, who have grown 
so fond of the position as to identify the cause 
with the ground they held, add to the noise of the 
enemy their own feeble wail that Christianity itself is 
in danger of destruction. Both the cry and the wail are 
out of place. That the Christian army should alter its 
front and take up new ground is a known necessity of the 
contest. It has done so often in the course of history, and 
we must expect that it will have to do so again. And the 



32 The Higher Judaism and Christianity. 

fact is that in all these changes it has never lost ground 
which it has not more than regained. It has left 
behind several positions which were useful at their time, 
and in these some stragglers are still fond of loitering ; 
it is even true that some large portions of the army have 
gone back to hold abandoned positions in order to keep 
up their communications with the past, but the van- 
guard is still in advance, ready to meet any difficulties 
introduced into the contest by the discoveries of science 
or the advance of criticism. It does not deny the truth 
of proved discoveries, nor the value of criticism, it 
only opposes the inferences drawn from them by persons 
afflicted with fanatic infidelity. Their attack is made 
upon Christianity as seen entrenched in the old position. 
Our answer is that we have abandoned that position, 
that it was only temporary, and that its abandonment 
has nothing to do with the abandonment of the cause. 
6 We have,' we say, ( absorbed what is proved true in your 
discoveries. And now attack us here if you will ; but 
do not go on storming into an empty camp and then 
saying that you have conquered the Christian host. It 
is only a few camp-followers whom you are slaying ; the 
veteran army is untouched.' 

At this moment, however, the inass of the army is 
making the transition. It has not yet understood where 
it is going to, nor the capabilities of the position it 
will occupy. Naturally it is harassed in its march, and 
though it does not lose its faith and courage, it does 
suffer a little from confusion. Some, on the assumption 
that it still holds verbal inspiration, prove that the 
whole of the Bible is unworthv of credit as a revelation, 



The Higher Jttdaism and Christianity, 33 



and it is rather difficult to convince these people that 
.verbal inspiration is not to be forced on us now, be- 
cause some may have held it once. And when, with 
the vanguard, we deny that inspiration brings infalli- 
bility to any parts of the Bible which belong to the 
domain of science or historical criticism, we cut the 
ground from under the feet of our opponents by deny- 
ing absolutely their major premiss. We have changed 
our front. They must seek another field of battle, a new 
form of the argument, if they can find it. Meanwhile, 
as we are making this transition, a number of minor 
attacks are made on us — masked attacks, some of which 
we know will answer themselves, and need only be 
allowed to exhaust themselves ; others, however, being 
in themselves interesting, and opening out attractive 
questions, are well worth replying to, especially when 
they lead us to dwell on certain distinctive elements 
in Christianity. One of these we shall speak of to-day. 

The more active investigation of the ancient religions 
brought to light many curious likenesses of Christianity. 
Not only many of its typical thoughts, but some of the 
very phrases used by Christ and his followers were dis- 
covered in the writings of Buddhists, Brahmans, Sikh 
doctors, Greeks, Eomans, and Jews, who had lived before 
his time. It was at once declared that the revelation in 
the Gospels was not an original revelation, that Christ 
Himself was no more than other great teachers had 
been, that what He said had been said before Him. At 
the present time this attack has been more plainly 
made in public and social discussion by a comparison of 
the teaching of the Talmud with the teaching of Christy 



34 The Higher ytidaism and Christianity, 

and the renewed inference by many persons whom one 
meets, that the latter was not original. 

In replying to that I put aside the question of dates, 
though no critical proof has been offered that the say- 
ings in question which are similar in the Talmud and 
Christianity were actually in existence before Christ. 

But I am willing to surrender this point, and to meet 
the whole matter on grounds which will include an 
answer to the other member of the question,— that is, 
the likeness of Christ's words, not only to the words of 
the Jewish, but also of Hindoo, Greek, and Buddhist 
doctors. The Talmudical question by itself is of small 
importance. It runs up into a larger question ; it is 
part of a whole, and to that whole we reply. 

First. We need not be at all astonished at this 
similarity; on the contrary, we ought to be surprised 
if it did not exist. 

I may approach what I mean by an analogy. There 
are certain myths common to almost all nations, not 
only to the Aryan, Semitic, or Turanian separately, 
but to ail of them alike. Now these myths stand on 
a somewhat different ground from those which arise 
out of the transference of poetic language used with 
regard to physical phenomena into a mythology of 
gods and heroes, for myths of this class vary with 
the various races. They occupy also a different ground 
from those which arise out of modifications of human 
development by race or climate, or any external cause. 
For they arise directly out of those consistent and 
universal properties of human nature which are as 
unchanged in all races as the plan of the vertebral 
column is in all the vertebrata. I believe myself that 



The Higher Judaism and Christianity. 35 



they must develope out of human nature ; that, given 
human nature, certain stories are sure to emerge, so that 
if a new race of human beings were to arise in some 
unreached corner of the world, and be entirely secluded 
for centuries from other men, we should find, on its dis- 
covery, these constant stories existing in that country. 

ISTow apply this analogy to the question before us. 
There are certain fundamental axioms of religion, which, 
supposing the religious impulse to exist in human 
nature, must in the course of centuries work their way 
through all error to the surface. They lie hid in the 
very essence of human nature. Existing during the 
era of savagery, they are certain, after it has past, to 
develope themselves as guiding principles of feeling and 
action. The mass of the common people will be in- 
fluenced by them unconsciously, but those men who 
rise above the mass in thought, and seclude themselves 
for contemplation, will finally come to see them clearly, 
and Having seen them will express them. It is almost 
certain, by the hypothesis, that they will be stated in 
all nations by such men in words which bear the closest 
similarity. For instance, e do unto others as ye would 
they should do unto you 5 is a spiritual saying which 
appears in many other religious boohs than the Talmud, 
and the extreme simplicity of the thought will naturally 
secure its expression in almost identical phraseology. 
In fact, how else can we express it ? 

It is, therefore, no matter of astonishment to me, but 
the contrary, when I find that those sayings of Christ 
which express fundamental ethical truths of human 
nature have been expressed before and in similar 



36 The Higher Judaism and Christianity. 

phraseology. If He be, as we believe, perfect Humanity, 
it would be passing strange if He did not state tbe 
ancient truths of humanity — and how else could He state 
them than in their natural, easy, unsensational form? 
They were axioms, they had to be axiomatically stated. 

We have now some grounds on which to frame our 
answer to the objection that Christ was not original. 
It is said, and as if it condemned his revelation : c See, 
Christ says nothing new. 5 

But ought we to expect the Saviour to be original in 
these points ? Did He claim entire originality by itself, 
as any mark of his mission ? Was there no light before 
his advent, no law written in men's hearts ? And when 
He arrived on earth, was He, in a vain striving after 
originality, to neglect and ignore the light and the law 
which his Father had given to the nations before He 
came. On the contrary, He accepted these things as 
Divine, embodied them in his teaching, and practically 
said to men, These things which My Father's Spirit 
taught you in the past, I redeclare in the present, with 
His authority. 

The fact is, He chose the old expressions by pre- 
ference, when He could. He did not wish to be original 
in these points. For He knew that his Father had 
been working hitherto. 

Therefore, I repeat, one of the deepest parts of his work 
was to resume in Himself all the past truth, to realise in 
Himself all the past ideals. He came to embody the long- 
ings of all mankind, to gather into Himself all the scat- 
tered lights of God which had shined before Him in 
men's souls, and condense them into a perfect star of 
Truth. 



The Higher Judaism and Christianity, 37 

He came to be Man, to represent in Himself Hindoo, 
Arabian, Chinese, Greek, Eornan, Jew — all nations and 
tongues ; for this follows directly from what seems 
the opposite, but is the converse statement — that in 
Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor Greek, barbarian, 
Scythian, bond or free, but He is all and in all. And 
as, one after another, we find in these various peoples 
Christ's phrases before Christ, we rejoice — it only proves 
our point — that He absorbed all the floating truths of 
humanity, passed them through the purifying crucible 
of his soul, cleansed them of their dross, and built 
them up with others which He revealed, into a temple 
of stainless gold. 

Our next question is : — In Avhat points did Christ's 
teaching of these common truths differ from the Jewish 
teaching of them ? What were the original elements in 
his revelation ? 

They were mainly two. First, He wove these truths 
up with a human life ; and secondly, He made them 
common coin. He went in and out among the people, 
preaching and living these truths. And it followed, that 
He caused a religious revolution. 

But the revolutionary nature of his work is one of 
the objections made against it. It is said that his 
work could have been done without Him ; that, in fact, 
the main truths He taught were slowly filtering into 
Jewish society, and even into Gentile society, from the 
great reservoir of wisdom among the sages of the Jews, 
and that their slow dispersion of wisdom was unattended 
by the evils of a revolution and subject to no reaction. 
Whereas, this young 1 enthusiastic genius — so one has 



38 The Higher Jttdaism and Christianity. 

Iieard the Saviour characterised— brought up in Galilee, 
where education was not so well maintained as in other 
parts of Palestine — broke in upon the quiet progress of 
truth, and hurried it forward into a revolution in which 
much excellent truth, being given too soon, was after- 
wards lost or perverted. And lastly, that his attacks 
on the Scribes and Pharisees as recorded in the Gospels 
are proof of his want of high training, and even of 
his ignorance, for the very things He taught were being 
taught by the best among those whom He satirized with 
such intemperance, 

We reply — reserving- the whole question of the evil 
or not of a religious revolution at this time for another 
sermon — first, that history does not confirm the theory 
that the high teaching of the Jewish sages was having 
much influence upon the world. We are told that they 
taught a large tolerance and a profound charity. Where 
is the proof that this teaching was effective ? 

Love to one's neighbour as to oneself — patience under 
injury — a universal spirit of charity even among those 
alone who held a common faith — that men should not 
seek the highest place — that the true master was as 
one who serveth — these things do not seem to have had 
the smallest influence among the Jewish parties during 
the last fatal war with Borne. 

And as to the influence of these truths upon the 
Gentile world, how many proselytes do we find, and how 
were they treated by the boasted tolerance of the higher 
Judaism? A few swallows do not make a summer, nor 
a few thousand proselytes a regenerated world. Nor 
does admission into the obiter court of the Temple and 



The Higher Judaism and Christianity. 39 

exclusion from the inner say much for ■ the perfect 
liberality of the Doctors of the Law. 

The fact is, however much they taught these truths, 
they did not teach them so as to make them influential. 

As to the statement that there were Pharisees to 
whom Christ's denunciations did not apply, no one ever 
doubted it. There are always men who stand apart 
from the violence and bigotry of their time, and the 
more bigoted the greater number are, the more will 
these isolate themselves. Of such a type Gamaliel is 
an instance. But such men, in their turn, react upon 
the mass and make its narrowness still more narrow, if 
narrowness be the tendency of the time. Moreover, as 
we shall see, the isolated culture of these men was, 
in itself, almost worse than bigotry. It threw the 
common people back into deeper ignorance. One may 
imagine the scorn with which Gamaliel would have 
treated men like the common Galileans whom Christ 
collected round Him, from the ill-concealed contempt 
with which he treated the Sanhedrin itself. The more 
one considers the matter, the more it seems that Christ's 
reproofs were well deserved. It may well be that there 
were a few wise and good men who did not share either 
in the scorn or the violence of the period. But we have 
no right to impute their wisdom to all the hierarchy 
in the face of much evidence to the contrary. Six oak 
trees in a wood do not make it an oak wood. 

But it is said again that the sayings of these wise 
men were household words among the Jews, and that 
Christ only repeated them. Why then, I ask, did they 
not tell upon the world as the words of Christ did? 



4-0 The Higher Judaism, and Christianity. 

Why did they not inspire men to go forth and preach 
them to the world ? Why did they not make an army 
of martyrs ? Why did they not overrun in a few years 
the Greek and Eoman worlds? Why did they not 
destroy Heathenism? 

The answer to this will answer also our previous 
question : in what points did Christ's teaching of these 
common truths differ from the Jewish teaching of 
them? 

The Jewish teaching did not succeed because it was 
not embodied in a person. Christ's teaching differed from 
that of the Jewish sages, first, in this, that it was 
these truths made real in a life. 

The teaching in the Jewish schools was of a noble 
religious type. But independent of the fact that the 
higher truths were not communicated to such persons as 
the shepherds of Bethlehem, the teaching was teaching 
and no more. No one dreamed of going among men 
and living the truths he taught. And the great mass 
of the people do not realise things by description. They 
must see in order to know. A lecturer gives a clear 
and accurate account of the sea to a class of inland 
persons not gifted with much imagination, and they 
now possess a mild interest in the information, but 
none in the sea itself. On the whole, they do not care to 
pursue the subject further. But suppose that the lecturer 
could suddenly transport his pupils to the Atlantic, and 
say, c Look there ; that is the ocean.' They would not 
know as much about it as if they had listened for hours 
to his lectures, but they would have what they had not 
before — a vivid interest in it ; they are inspired to study 



The Higher Judaism and Christianity. 4 1 

it for themselves, and in the- end, because they love it, 
and are thrilled by its power and beauty, they learn to 
know it better than they could by any elaborate descrip- 
tion. 

So here, truths were given by the Jewish sages to the 
people in the schools, analysed, reduced to proverbial 
forms, and they had no universal effect ; they produced 
no vital interest. 

At last one comes who says, I am the Truth and 
the Life. Look here— see my works, behold my life, 
what I say, and do, and live ; that is the mind and 
the character of God. It is easy to put that to the 
test ; the spectators are interested ; they do not under- 
stand the theory of truth so well at first, but they are 
thrilled, inspired, impelled. They cannot resfc till they 
have seen all they can; they comprehend what they 
see ; they return again and again to the human realisa- 
tion of the truth. 

This was the manner of Christ's teaching, and the 
influence of it crept into the study of men's imagination. 

Again, it is hard to love merely ideal truth. Unless 
truth is connected with a person whom one can love, it 
does not get afloat, it lies stranded on the beach. 
Preach such a truth as c Love your neighbour as your- 
self,' and it has but little attractiveness till you have 
connected it with the life of some one who has fulfilled 
it. But then men's hearts are stirred, they love the 
man and necessarily the truth which made the man. 
Then love gives it vogue — a fire burns in our hearts ; 
we must speak or die ; we speak, and the fire is commu- 
nicated ; it runs from soul to soul, spreading, kindling 
3 



42 The Higher Judaism and Christianity. 

as it goes. We want truth embodied in a person whom 
we can love. 

It was because this was done by Christ that Chris- 
tianity succeeded where Jewish wisdom failed. A great 
love to a man arose, mingled with a profound venera- 
tion for his character. Both these, love and reverence, 
were irresistible. Men's hearts were drawn to Him 
as the seas are to the moon. He had laid down his 
life for them ; they would die for Him. He had borne 
witness to the truth in death ; they would die for his 
truth. He had lived among them a perfect life, and 
what He taught was guaranteed and glorified by it. 
It was not so much truths or a system of truths which 
they saw. It was Christ as the incarnate Truth. A 
central point was given to which all the rays of truth 
could be traced, at which their inner harmony was seen ; 
and at once the teaching which had this human centre 
took fire, force, movement, expansion, and radiated over 
the world. 

This leads me to the second and the last reason I 
shall give for the success of Christianity as contrasted 
with the failure of the Jewish sages. It was preached 
to the common people. 

I have said that truths require to be lived — nay, 
more, to be died for — to give them vogue. But that 
they should be lived and died for, they must come into 
the open arena of the world, among the mass of every- 
day men and women ; they must come out of the retired 
cloisters of the schools. That they should emerge clearly 
and tahe distinct outlines, such outlines as the populace 
can grasp, they must be brought into direct opposition 



Tlie Higher Judaism and Christianity. 43 

with their contraries in the popular tendencies of the 
times. They must not be truths of the study, but of 
the fishing-boat, and the market, and the exchange, 
and the country village. They must not be entrusted 
to a few scholars, but sown broadcast oyer the people. 
They must not avoid attack, but meet it ; they must 
not be kept back for fear of revolutions, but must expect 
revolutions and flourish in their atmosphere. 

This was the element in which Christ lived, and these 
were the tests He chose for his teaching. He made his 
truths common property ; He taught them to all alike. 
He made no conditions, required no special training. 
They were men to whom He spoke ; that was enough 
for Christ, and his practice was the keynote of all suc- 
ceeding efforts, political or otherwise, to secure liberty 
of life and thought for the people. This was what, 
it seems, the Jewish doctors did not do. Talce the 
instance of freedom from the bondage of the law. We 
are told that it was preached before Him. Who ever 
denied it ? We find it, independent of the Talmud, in 
other ancient writings. But again, the question comes, 
Why had it no vogue ? Why had it no popular fruit ? 
Why did its teaching not create a character like S. 
Paul's ? Why had it no vital, changing, regenerating 
power ? 

There was something dead at its root. I believe it 
was that it was confined to an intellectual oligarchy, 
possessing that indifference to the advance of spiritual 
truth which accompanies a merely intellectual concep- 
tion of it ; that universal tolerance which lets things 
run along, and which loses its good when it becomes 



44 The. Higher Judaism and Christianity. 

tolerant of evil ; that hatred of revolutionary movements 
which has ever characterised the aristocracy of culture. 

Now, if there is one oligarchy more tyrannical and 
dangerous to true liberty than another, it is an oli- 
garchy of culture ; and that was the position of the Jewish 
sages, exceptions of course being understood. It is 
inferred, however, that the Jewish schools were demo- 
cratic because every man was taught a trade, because 
among the roll of their wisest men there were tanners, 
carpenters, gardeners, men of the common people. But 
if these men were drawn from the ranks, it does not 
follow that they were fond of enlightening the class from 
which they sprang. On the contrary, these are almost 
invariably the worst defenders of their own class, the 
most anxious often to keep up a barrier, the greatest 
despisers of those among whom they once lived : and as 
to the democratic element in such a society, it may last 
for a time, but we know from the history of the mediaeval 
Church, which drew priests, cardinals, and popes from 
the lowest ranks, what its boasted sympathy with the 
people came to in the end. 

Eo ; I think we have every reason to conclude that 
the text, ' this people who knoweth not the law are 
cursed,' is a real picture of what was going on in Pales- 
tine at the time of our Lord. If so, can you wonder at 
his denunciations ? If the mass of the Pharisees were 
keeping up this esoteric learning, this seclusion of 
higher truths to a cultured few, are not Christ's words of 
indignation justified ? — are you astonished that the very 
truths these men held turned to poison in their hearts ? 
Above all, is it at all astonishing that these truths had 



The Higher Judaism and Christianity. 45 



no extension, that they did but little work, that they 
produced no universal religion? The chill region of 
intellectual knowledge of spiritual truth in which these 
doctors lived exiled from it popular enthusiasm. Con- 
nected with an exclusive class, they could not be teachers 
of the common people. They themselves wanted the 
strong life and faithful energy which belong to the 
common people. Only in that element could great 
truths organise themselves into a religion for men. 
Aristocracies, and especially aristocracies of culture, are 
not naturally religious 5 democracies are. The religions 
of the world' have arisen from and been supported by 
the people. It is very plain that Christ saw and acted 
upon that. He committed his truths to fishermen, 
publicans, villagers, to Galilgeans, to unlearned and igno- 
rant men, whose hearts were free and natural, whose 
intellects were capable of new thought ; He threw 
Himself upon the common people. He gave the loftiest 
truths to all men alike. He rejected all clinging to 
culture which tended to isolate a class or to limit the 
universality of his work. He poured e light and sweet- 
ness 5 on men, but it was a light which shone like 
the sun upon all alike, it was a sweetness of thought 
and feeling which expended itself upon the unwise as 
well as the wise, the outcast from society as well as the 
rabbi who was honoured in the Temple. 

It was partly this that made his teaching stream like 
a river and swell like a sea. It was this partly that 
sent it in a few years over Judeea, Greece, Rome, and 
Asia. It was partly this that made all nations flow 
into it. It was partly this that gave it its expanding, 



46 The Higher jfudaism and Christianity. 

its conquering* power. It was partly this that chimed 
in with the great movement of the world towards the 
overthrow of a corrupt imperialism and a cruel oppres- 
sion of the people. It was partly this that sent its 
mighty waves onwards in ever increasing volume, till 
they drowned beneath their tide the temples of Pagan- 
ism and the ruins of the old philosophies. 

It was this which was symbolised at his birth, when 
around his sacred infancy knelt in a common worship^ 
the men from the East, the rich, the wise, and the nobly 
born ; the shepherds from the hills of Bethlehem, poor, 
ignorant, and low born ; when intellect and ignorance 
alike grew wiser by receiving the kingdom of God as a 
little child. 



Judaism and Christianity. 47 



JUDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY. 

i Whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, 
and will gather the wheat into his garner j but the chaff he will 
burn with fire unquenchable.' — Luke iii. 17. 

6 It is the glory of Christianity/ says a modern writer, 
6 that it carried the golden germs hidden in the schools 
and among the silent community of the learned, into 
the market of humanity.' Yes, that is one of the glories 
of Christianity as contrasted with esoteric schools, with 
that aristocracy of culture which reserves truths to itself 
or does not care, in learned laziness, to spread them 
among the common people. Granting that the Jewish 
doctors possessed, before Christ came, many of the 
truths He taught, it is plain that, in spite of the 
large extension of schools, there was no organised mis- 
sionary effort to spread them among the masses. The 
phrase, e this people who knoweth not the law are 
cursed,' to whatever da,te we assign the gospel in which 
it occurs, has its importance when we compare it with 
another in the gospel of S. Luke : c The common people 
heard Christ gladly.' Whatever may have been the 
excellence of the teaching which lay hid among the 
wise men of the Pharisees, it is plain that it lay hid, 
that the mass of the Pharisees stood apart from the 



48 



Judaism and Christianity. 



uneducated masses of the people, and felt that to throw 
truth broadcast before them was casting pearls before 
swine. 

It is plain that though they possessed in their books 
pleasant stories like the parables, in which truths were 
represented in simple and natural forms, yet that they 
had never gone about to recite them to the fisherman 
and the shepherd, never sought by delightful out-of- 
door teaching, which laid all nature under contribution, 
to bring around them a multitude of men, women, and 
children belonging to the people. Whatever their 
teaching was, it awakened no popular enthusiasm, it 
did not seek for the unlearned and the ignorant by 
preference. It is probable that they feared the results : 
partly for their own power, which, being exclusive, would 
be sure to be endangered by any popular movement ; 
partly because they dreaded that a popular religious 
movement might pass into a political one, and involve 
them with the Eoman governor. Moreover, the very 
theory which depreciates Christianity, in contrast with 
the higher Judaism, of itself denies that the Jewish 
sages communicated their truths in an unrestricted 
manner to the whole mass of the common people. It 
asks, with a kind of suppressed scorn, what you can 
expect, when great and golden truths are thrown reck- 
lessly among rude and -untrained persons, but a whirl- 
wind of aimless enthusiasm, and an overthrow of the 
quiet house of wisdom. It declares that the revolu- 
tionary impulse of Christianity has, while apparently 
pushing the world forward, in reality put it back, because 
its truths were bestowed on ordinary men before they 



Judaism and Christianity. 49 



were ready for them. It is a view which, has always 
characterised exclusive cliques of culture, whether 
intellectual or religious. Our small bodies of clever 
young men, who have their peculiar admirations in art 
and poetry, or political science 5 our exquisitely cultured 
sects in manners, or in literature, or in morals, or 
immorals, one and all, but with different vehemence 
and meaning, say, ' These people who know not the 
law are cursed.' 

I rejoice to feel that Christianity did not accept that 
ground, nor begin upon it. Neither Christ nor his fol- 
lowers had a shred of that learned exclusiveness which 
is content to think and contemplate, but shuns the 
rude touch of the common world. They had no well- 
bred shrinking from men ; they sought out the sinner, 
the poverty-stricken, the leper, the harlot, and the 
publican. 4 It is to you I have been sent,' said Christ ; 
6 the kingdom of God is come to you as well as to 
others.' He had no thought that one man, by educa- 
tion, or learning, or genius, or money, or fame, or by 
anything external, was spiritually better than another. 
His Father loved men because they were men, and 
He loved those best who were humblest, meekest, 
and most loving. He favoured no class, He gave 
special privileges to no long descent from Abraham. 
All were Abraham's children who were like Abraham 
in character. He had no fear of results to Himself or to 
the people. He did not hold back for an instant be- 
cause He saw what would follow his teaching — excite- 
ment, reaction, many evils, his own death, his followers' 
persecution, the division* of the world into opposing 



50 Judaism and Christianity. 



camps. He accepted all these as necessary, and went 
forward to bear witness to the truth at all risks, be- 
lieving that it was sin to keep back truth becanse it 
would create disturbance — now that the fulness of time 
had come. 

Hence his action proves that He at least did not 
hold the theory of the nndesirableness of revolutions. 
Indeed we may assume that as He brought a revelation, 
He knew that it would upturn the world. Revelations 
have always caused revolutions. One follows on the 
other, as an outburst of new life follows the advent of 
the spring. 

There is a certain amount of truth, however, in saying 
that revolutions are undesirable ; that one ought not 
to make revelations of truths which cause convulsions, 
when the people are not prepared for these truths. But 
it is the fashion at present to extend this rule too far — 
to say that revolutions are always undesirable. It is said, 
for instance, that the revolution which Luther worked in 
religious thought was premature, that the learning of the 
Renaissance, christianised by Erasmus and others of his 
type, would slowly have percolated through society and 
regenerated it, without bringing in its train the intole- 
rance, war, bigotry, and division of sects whicli followed 
the Reformation. It is an exactly analogous asser- 
tion to that which is made about Christianity and 
the higher Judaism. The only question is — would the 
percolating process have succeeded ; would the teachiiig 
of men like Erasmus have had force enough to over- 
throw the Epicureanism and infidelity which bad 
taken new forms with the revival of learning; could 



yudaism and Christianity. 5 1 



it live in a period of change, and disturbance, and wars, 
and become a part of them, and modify them to its 
own end ; would it ever get below the educated and 
refined strata of society ? 

It never did get below, it could not touch the people's 
heart ; it was not a popular movement, it shrank from 
vulgarity and the contact of the common sort ; when 
war came it retired from the field into contemplation ; 
it could not ride on the whirlwind and direct the storm. 
And as such, it had, like the higher Judaism, no vogue, 
no rush, no rough life in it, no future. If ideas are to 
live, I repeat, they must be such as to move the common 
people. 

It was this that Luther did. It may be answered 
that he clung to princes, and opposed the war against 
the oppression of the nobles. It is true, but the ideas 
he gave were ideas which seized on the hearts of the 
common people, and though his action may have been 
aristocratic, his thought was making democracy. He 
claimed in the realm of religion freedom of thought 
for all, and though he opposed the peasant war, and 
would have hated the principles of the French revolu- 
tion, yet these were both the direct results of a teaching 
which men were not slow to transfer from the sphere of 
religion to the sphere of politics. 

The same is true, certain things being changed, with 
regard to Christianity and Judaism. Christ, as Luther 
did, saw that this cloistered wisdom which was not 
given to the common people would never do anything — 
that it had not power to overcome the carelessness, 
immorality, and selfishness of the Jewish and heathen 



52 



Judaism and Christianity. 



world, and He chose deliberately the sudden revealing 
of truth in preference to the system which said : Let 
truth slowly filter through the world. He chose revo- 
lution. 

But we cannot imagine that He chose it, as Luther 
did, without knowing what He did. Luther did not see 
results 5 Christ did. He knew, He felt, with the divine 
instinct of one in whom the heart of the whole race 
beat, that the revolution which He made was not only 
not undesirable, but absolutely necessary. For the 
ideas of the 'old world were exhausted, at least in their 
existing form. ( Those of them which were true needed 
a new spirit. The fulness of time, as S. Paul says, had 
come, and if Christ did not act now, decay would have 
advanced too far for a resurrection. 

The pear was ripe, it would not do to wait till it 
was rotten. The objection is that the revelation was 
given too soon, that it produced a convulsion, and 
had all the faults of a convulsion. But there are 
times in history when, as in the physical world, the 
forces which have been generating for many centuries 
reach at last their maximum of expansion. One touch 
then, and the earthquake or the revolution takes place. 
Of the old Jewish and heathen thought there was- 
nothing existing but the superficial crust. Beneath, 
all had been metamorphosed into elements which 
wanted but a touch to reorganise themselves into a 
new form of religion. It was the fulness of time; 
Christ came 5 a new element was added to those already 
in solution, and all leaped into life as Christianity. 

The very fact on which so much stress has been laid, 



Judaism and Christianity. 



53 



that the higher Jewish thought resembled the Christian 
thought, is a proof of the metamorphosis of the old 
Judaic elements. But when it is said that this resem- 
blance or identity made the Christian revolution un- 
necessary, it is forgotten that though the thought was 
new the forms were old. The thoughts of Hillel and 
others could not get into acceptance because new 
thoughts cannot be communicated through old forms. 
Christ Himself saw that clearly. No man, He said, 
putteth new cloth on an old garment. Nay more, the 
new thought in that case is lost, and so are the old 
forms. c The bottles break, and the wine is spilled. But 
new wine is put into new bottles, and both are preserved.' 
It is an exact parable of the fate of the higher Judaism 
and of the success of Christianity. 

Again, supposing that Christ had not caused this 
revolution which upturned the old edifice, the edifice 
must have perished all the same. It might not have 
fallen, as He made it fall, in a moment and with a 
crash, but it would have melted away piece by piece. 
And if the new ideas had been connected with it and 
sent forth to the world from it, as the theory we are 
opposing 1 wishes, the result would have been the de- 
struction, for a time at least, of the ideas. They 
would have been involved in its ruin. This is what the 
sudden revolution of Christianity avoided : Christ con- 
nected the new thought with a new form, and directed 
it into a right channel. 

This also was of importance, that it should be rightly 
directed. Had He not come, what would have been the 
end ? Would the new thought have gone on filtering 



54 Judaism and Christianity. 

slowly through, the world ? By no means. It was too 
strong for that. Its fountain waters were too near 
the surface. It was too late for slow filtration. Men 
strove to keep it hack for fear of the excitement it would 
cause among the people ; hut they could not altogether 
restrain it, and it broke forth in isolated places and in 
portions, which, because they were only portions of 
truth, took false forms. Already, before Christ came, 
there had been two political religious revivals of the 
worst kind. If He had not come, the new thought 
would have taken the form of a political revolution, 
and been crushed with it by the Romans; while with its 
overthrow would have perished also all that was great 
and noble in the old Judaism. It would have been 
universal ruin. 

Christ came and hewed out for its waters a new and 
fitting channel. He led it away from the political 
gToove where it would have been destroyed, by uniting 
it with a spiritual kingdom. 6 My kingdom is not of 
this world.' He added to it other and deeper thoughts. 
He freed it from the danger which beset it from the 
side of the Roman government, He gave it free course 
over a region wide as mankind, but into which the 
Roman power did not care to enter. By these means 
He succeeded in retaining all that was good in the 
past, and made the growth of the new religion succes- 
sive and not sudden, easy and not violent, healthy and 
not convulsive. Instead, then, of saying that Christ 
caused a revolution which put back the progress of the 
world, we should say that He saved the revolution which 
was necessary from the violence which would have 



Judaism and Christianity. 5 5 

brought about its ruin ; that He saved it from having 
to be done all over again, as, to give a political illus- 
tration, has been the case with the French revolution. 

What now were the characteristics of this revolution ? 
1, It was destructive. It proclaimed war against the prin- 
ciples opposed to it. In this at least it differed totally 
from the supposed idea of the Jewish wisdom. To an- 
nounce war against the old systems, uncompromising 
war, could not be held in that idea. The theory is that 
the Jewish sages wished to slowly winnow away the 
chaff and leave the corn. It is the idea which naturally 
belongs to a high culture. Every cultivated man allows 
its excellence, and it is fully contained and accepted in 
Christianity, the slowness of the growth of which is 
insisted on again and again by Christ. But there are 
certain times in history when a great shock is necessary, 
and those are the greatest men who can see this and 
boldly risk the danger. There arc times when it is too 
late to expect that the world can be saved by the instil- 
lation of good, times when the chaff is so multitudinous 
and so rotten that the wheat is in a double danger, the 
danger of being lost, the danger of being corrupted. 
The only thing then is to burn up the chaff at once 
with a fire which will not touch the wheat. This, 
which cannot be done in the physical, can be done in 
the moral and spiritual world. It is the characteristic 
property of a noble and living idea, when it gets loose 
upon the world, to consume all that is base and dead, 
and to assimilate all that is like itself. Christ saw that 
the time had come, that the whole world of Jews and 
heathens was so choked up with chaff that a slow 



56 Judaism and Christianity. 



process would be ruin. He seized the moment, He 
accepted its dangers, and He sent forth ideas which 
flew along like flame, consuming, destroying, but also 
assimilating. 6 Whose fan was in his hand, and He did 
throughly purge his floor, and gather the wheat into 
his garner. But the chaff He burned up with un- 
quenchable fire.' 

It is curious how clearly his Apostles saw, through 
his spirit, that the race of the old philosophies and 
of Judaism under its old forms was run. The fa- 
bric of Eoman heathenism was at its highest external 
splendour ; the fabric of Judaic morality had never 
been so concentrated, so powerful over the souls of 
men. It would seem insanity to attack them ; it 
would raise a laugh to say that they were dead. And 
yet a few unlearned and common men said that both 
were effete, that their fabrics were rotten inwardly, that- 
they only wanted a push to perish. As such, they were 
corrupting the world, and no mercy was to be shown to 
them. And the rain descended and the wind blew and 
the floods beat upon those specious houses in every word 
which the disciples of Jesus spake, and they fell, and 
great was the fall of them. They were founded on the 
sand. The result proved that Christianity was right, 
for the victory was won against tremendous odds, not by 
force of arms but by force of faith and force of thought. 

2. But if Christianity was destructive as a revolution 
it was also preservative. If Christ sent forth ideas 
which consumed the chaff, He sent them forth also to 
gather the wheat into his garner. The judgment of 
the corrupt elements in the Jewish and heathen worlds 



Judaism and Christianity. 



57 



enabled Christianity, ere it was too late, to assimilate 
their scattered wheat. No noble feeling or true thought, 
either in Judaism or in heathenism, perished. They 
were taken up and woven into the new fabric. Take 
an historical instance. Rome had still a splendid code 
and tradition of law, civilised customs, a majestic 
mode of building, a literature, an impressive social 
culture. These were all bound up with an empire 
which, as the years went on, fell ever more rapidly 
to pieces. Its death-throes were protracted, but death 
was there. Now why, when the northern nations came 
like eagles on this carcase, why did not all these useful 
elements perish with it ? Because when the nations 
came they found all these elements not only in the 
dying empire, but in the living Church. Christianity 
had taken them into itself, assimilated them ; and so 
abounding in life was the new Christian body that it 
conquered the conquerors of Eome and handed on to the 
new peoples which grew out of the barbarian hordes 
the unextinguished torches of Roinan literature, of Ro- 
man law, of Roman culture, of Roman architecture. 

It was the same with religion. At Alexandria, at 
Rome, in Greece, in the East, wherever Christianity 
came, it displayed this wonderful power of collecting 
into itself and using the living thoughts of the past, 
while it rejected those that had no vitality. It abolished 
all the old forms in which these living thoughts had 
been clothed, it took the living things themselves, and 
modified them so as to unite them to its own life. It 
was this which soon collected into the Church almost 
all the intellect of the world of that time. 



58 Judaism and Christianity. 

8. Its third element was a civilising power. Neither 
Greek science nor Roman culture had power to spread 
beyond themselves. The Romans themselves — and we 
have the testimony of the Emperor Julian to this — con- 
sidered the barbarous Western nations incapable of 
culture. The fact was that Rome did not try to 
civilise in the right way. Instead of drawing forth the 
native energies of these nations, while it left them 
free to develope their own national peculiarities in 
their own way, it imposed on them from without the 
Roman education. It tried to turn them into Romans. 
Where this effort was unsuccessful, the men remained 
barbarous ; where it was successful, the nation lost its 
distinctive elements in the Roman elements, at least 
till after some centuries the overwhelming influence of 
Rome had perished. Meantime, they were not Britons, 
nor Gauls, but spurious Romans. The natural growth of 
the people was arrested. Men living out of their native 
element became stunted and spiritless. 

It was of the first importance, then, that some civil- 
ising influence should arise which should permit of 
free development — which should save the world from 
the dilemma of being made altogether in the Roman 
pattern, or of remaining in barbarism. 

This was the work of Christianity, and it was done 
by its ministers, in the first place, not as apostles of 
culture, but as persons who spoke to the common wants 
of the spirit of man. They made simple statements 
which appealed to universal feelings, and for the truth 
of which they appealed to the necessities of man. God 
is Love, they said ; One h .s come who will give rest to 
the weary and heavy-laden ; there is a world in which 



Judaism and Christianity. 



59 



all men are equal, and all brothers, as children of a 
heavenly Father ; the spirit of man is as immortal as 
God Himself; the sense of sin in the heart is taken 
away by a Saviour who redeems us by giving us power 
to do sin no more. These and others fell like dew upon 
the thirsty land of the spirit of man, and awoke into life 
the seeds of the spiritual powers ; the resurrection of 
the soul to life took place. That was the first step. 
One part of the man began to live naturally, freely, 
lovingly. But it is the property of life to communicate 
itself to all parts of the system in which it begins to 
act ; and on the development of the spirit followed the 
development of the heart and the intellect. And the 
growth was from within outwardly. The Christian 
teachers reversed the Roman mode of proceeding. 
Hence the peculiar character of any nation was not 
lost in Christianity, but, so far as it was good, developed 
and intensified. The people grew naturally into their 
distinctive type and place in the world. 

But was it zeal for science or love of philosophy which 
led men to leave the pleasant seats of civilisation to 
instruct and help the barbarous nations ? Neither Stoic, 
nor Platonist, nor Judaic ISTeo-Platonist ever did it. ~No ; 
the power which led them forth was the kindling with- 
in them of a great love to a divine man, who said that 
all men were his brothers, who had given his life for 
all, and who declared that those who loved Him should 
go forth to preach his good tidings, to heal the sick, to 
bind up the broken heart, to deliver those who were 
bound, to seek and save the lost. This was work which 
the exclusive spirit of the Jewish sages could not do. 

The missionary spirit was the product of love to 



60 yudaism and Christianity. 

Christ. The civilisation of the barbarians was the pro- 
duct of the missionary spirit. 

And now, in conclusion, we resume all that has been 
said, in another form. That which is true about the 
great movements of the world is not without its personal 
interest to us, nor without its analogies in our life. 
We also have our revolutions. 

Much has been said about the crisis which comes 
upon many young men after their entrance into life, 
when, after emerging from the university, the first 
overwhelming impression of the movements and com- 
plexity of the great world is made upon them. But 
little has been said of that more secret upturning- 
of the soul which takes place in manhood, and of 
which the outspoken early movement is but the fore- 
runner — the little wave which breaks in foam and noise 
upon the beach, before the long, massive, immense 
volume of the swell glides silently up the shore to move 
the very foundations of the breakwater. Men and 
Avomen rarely speak of this ; the only outward sign is a 
slight tinge of bitterness. But beneath the quietude a 
tempest is at work. The time comes, when a man knows 
that if he is to be worth anything, he must be true, he 
must get rid of all conventional beliefs and understand 
what he means and on what he can rest. The old forms 
of his thought are exhausted; the old religion of his 
childhood has no words for him ; the very enthusiasms 
of his youth he finds but poor images of the unreached 
ideals which cry aloud within him. By many impulses 
and events, by loves, sorrows, hates ; by clashing with the 



Judaism and Christianity. 6 1 



world, by unexpected agonies in his own heart 5 by the 
weaving* and unweaving pf life — by the direct speech of 
God — the elements of a new being have gradually col- 
lected beneath the crust of the old. New ideas, new 
points of view, new perceptions of the world around, new 
phases of old problems, have gradually accumulated till 
the ancient forms are no longer able to bear the pres- 
sure. The fulness of time has come ; a revolution is 
necessary. 

It is sore work when that day arrives, and men are 
often so tired then that it seems unfair that all the inner 
life should be again disturbed, and that, not as before on 
the surface, but down to and throughout the very depths 
of being. But it is at the peril of our worthiness that 
we refuse. its call, and hush its elements into a false 
. peace ; we must go through with it. 

The solemn question is — how will its elements brealv 
out? — towards the world or towards God? Shall the 
spirit of Theudas and Judas be at its head, or the spirit 
of Christ? Will it be ruled by the spirit of meekness, 
of dependence on a Father, or by the spirit of display 
and self-dependence ? Will the final result of it be — 
' Not this man, but Barabbas ' — or 6 For this end was I 
born, and for this cause came I into the world, to bear 
witness to the truth'? 

There are many to whom these words of mine, vague 
as they are, have their meaning. Such secret revolu- 
tions are more frequent every day. 

I will not say what is the result if the overthrow of 
the old is followed by an overthrow of all, and faith in 
God, in morality, in immortality, is drowned ; but 1 
will say what this revolution is, if it is towards God. 



62 Judaism and Christianity. 



It is also destructive. It brings with, it a living 
flame which burns up our ch^ff. It goes forth to con- 
sume our evil, and it does not cease. It proclaims war 
against all that is base, unbelieving, unhopeful, and 
unloving. It takes us into union with Christ- — the 
hater, the enemy, and the conqueror of evil. 

It is preservative. It destroys nothing which is noble 
in our past ; it does not limit or enslave any high thought 
or true aspiration ; it does not crush our nature, where 
our nature has been godlike. It takes, on the contrary, 
all things good into itself ; it assimilates their elements, 
and informs them with its own life; it makes them 
nobler, greater, and eternal, by uniting them to a new 
and living idea, and by directing them to find their 
growth and their goal in God, from whom they came. 

And lastly, it goes forth to civilise — or, shall we 
say, to sanctify the whole man. It penetrates to the 
outlying portions of the soul which as yet have not 
been touched. It awakens capabilities the existence of 
which we did not suspect. It brings into harmony 
with God, interests — such as love of art, or the serious 
play of imagination, or political or business life — which 
we thought could not have anything to do with re- 
ligious life. It institutes and carries out an inward 
missionary movement to every point of our manifold 
nature, till the whole man is saved, ennobled, purified ; 
and we are as the world shall be, wholly redeemed and 
glorified, body, soul, and spirit. 

Therefore, O God our Father, come to us through 
Christ this Advent time. Incarnate Thyself in us. 
Give to us the revelation which makes revolution. 



TJie Central Truth of Christianity. 



63 



THE CENTRAL TRUTH OF CHRISTIANITY. 
* And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.' — John i. 14. 

It happened, once on a time, as men went to and fro 
in the world who were interested in the arts, that they 
discovered, at different periods, and hidden away in 
many countries, portions, it seemed, of exquisite statues 
— a foot, an arm, a torso, a broken hand. Something 
superb in each of these made men recognise them at 
once as perfect. Each nation cherished their separate 
piece as an ideal of art ; each drifted into a thousand 
suspicions as to the author and his intention ; each 
completed the statue from conjecture according to their 
own ability. At last, owing to the decay of the nations, 
and to the rise of one upon their ruins, all the several 
pieces were collected in one museum. They were still 
considered as belonging to separate nations and periods 
of art. Dissertations were written and lectures were 
delivered upon them ; the ideal completions which each 
nation had made of their several pieces were placed 
beside them, and the completions studied with infinite 
criticism. 

One day, however, when the artist world were col- 
lected in the museum, a man whom no one knew, 



64 The Central Truth of Christianity. 

entered, and slowly went from room to room examining 
the famous remnants one after another, but passing by 
the completions of each with some indifference. At 
last he . approached the group of artists : c Sirs,' he said, 
c I have examined your famous pieces of sculpture, and 
their ideal restorations. The restorations are interest- 
ing as examples of art at different periods, but worth- 
less as a foundation for any true ideal. But, did it never 
strike you that all your pieces are of the same time and 
by the same hand, and that you have but to bring them 
together out of their several rooms and unite them ? 
Your ideal statue is among you, and you know it not.' 
When he had thus spoken, many laughed and some 
mocked, but a few were found to listen ; the greater 
part, however, as the stranger grew more earnest, be- 
came indignant — for what would become of their art 
theories if he were right ? — and drove him out of the 
museum with ignominy. But the few sought him out, 
and it is said that they entered the building by night 
and brought together the remnants, the stranger super- 
intending, and found it even as he had said. They saw 
the statue grow, piece by piece, into unity, but at the 
end the head was wanting. A great cry of pity arose — 
6 What ! ' they wept, 6 shall we never see the ideal 
realised ? ' But the stranger, as they wept, drew from be- 
neath his cloak the head, and crowned the statue with 
completeness. And as he did so, he passed away and 
was seen no more. But the perfect thing remained — the 
pure ideal of divine art, fully realised at last. Then 
those few gave up their theories, and their delight in 
the separate remnants and their restorations, and went 



The Central Truth of Christianity. 65 



abroad, taking with them the perfect thing, to preach 
a new kingdom of* art ; and when men asked them to 
define and theorise art, the j stept aside, and unveiling 
the statue, said, ' Look and see ; this is Art. If yon can 
receive it, von too will become artists. This is ail our 
definition, this is all onr theory.' And some believed and 
others did not, but slowly the new ideal won its way, 
till it grew to be the rule and the model of the greater 
part of the artist world. 

Of what took place at the museum when the mockers 
found their pieces gone — of how they fought against 
the possessors of the statue, and denied that it had 
anything to do with their lost remnants ; of how they 
made counterfeits of these remnants, and clung to their 
ancient restorations as the true ideals — I need not tell ; 
nor yet of a more pitiable thing — of how in after times 
the followers of the true ideal made false copies of it, 
modifying it, and introducing their own ideas into it, 
and held up these, and not the perfect statue, for the 
imitation and aspiration of the world of art. Are not 
these things written in history ? But again and again, 
the one effort of all true artists since has been to bring 
back men to the contemplation of that single figure. 

This parable illustrates what I have been saying 
for some Sundays. The scattered truths of the world 
were truths from God. Men wove diverse religions 
round the diverse truths. At last Christ came, and 
did not reject, but brought together in Himself, the 
previous truths — made them for the first time fifc into 
one another, so that each took its place; and then 
4 



66 The Central Truth of Christianity. 

crowned them -with the completing and new truth — 
the truth of the Divine Man. 

These two things — the bringing into harmony of 
truths and the addition of the truth of the God Man 
— are distinctive peculiarities of Christianity, and of 
these we speak to-day. 

It is not difficult to illustrate what I mean by the 
harmonising of truth. Before the time of Newton, 
many isolated facts concerning the universe and its 
motions had been discovered, but they remained like 
isolated lights at a distance from each other. But when 
the philosopher came who saw into the life of things, 
and the theory of gravitation was born, it made the 
previous truths concordant ; their separate lights shot 
into its brilliant beam, and the beacon blazed by which 
we read the secrets of the universe. It was then that 
the astronomer's work became practical. He had a 
truth which gave tenfold value to other truths, and 
made them instruments of tenfold power. He had a 
truth in which all the phenomena of nature were corre- 
lated, and as he learnt their several relations, each 
became a key to unlock the difficulties of the others. 
Much remained unexplained, but he knew now that 
investigation and patience were all that were needed. 
He had the key of the universe in his hand ; he was 
sure of finding out all truth within the sphere of his 
special business. 

This is that which Christ did for us. We have granted 
that many truths which He declared afresh existed 
before his time; but they were isolated, their mutual 
connection was not perceived. Hence they had no 



The Central Truth of Christianity, 67 

regenerative power, but little practical power. Great 
men worked at them, carried them out into separate 
philosophies, but they never got any wide popular in- 
fluence, and they were finally buried under a weight 
of conjectures and conceits. The first enthusiasm they 
had created died away — nor, indeed, did they ever pro- 
duce that peculiar characteristic of Christianity, an 
active and unceasing propagandism. 

But under the transforming hand of Christ, these 
truths came together into a perfect whole. The truth 
of doing good for good's sake became in harmony with 
the truth of doing good for the sake of immortal life. 
They had formerly clashed, and there are persons yet 
who think they clash. The truth that the soul is to 
be absorbed in God united itself with the truth of the 
distinct personality of the soul, and in uniting, the one 
lost its pantheism and the other its isolated self-de- 
pendence. The truth that men lived by faith, and the 
apparently opposed truth that they lived by works, 
found in the love which Christ awoke to Himself a 
point where they mingled into one. No truth was left 
to sound its note alone, but all together harmonised 
arose into 

That undisturbed song of pure concent 

Aye sung before the sapphire coloured throne. 

If this be true, it forms one of the distinctive qualities 
of Christianity. ISTo heathen philosophy had done it, 
no heathen religion had attempted it. In fact, they 
had not the materials. No Jewish Doctors had suc- 
ceeded in it, though they had attempted it. One or 
two may have had, as had the heathen, glimpses of it — 



68 TIte Central Truth of Christianity. 

all had a Vague suspicion of it ; but it still remained a 
vision till Christ came and supplied the magic word 
which gave the spiritual affinity of all truths space and 
power to act. 

Immediately on coming into harmony, they became 
inspiring principles in men and instruments powerful 
for practical work. They took new and vigorous de- 
velopments — as, for example, the truth of immortality. 
The men who possessed them were conscious of power, 
and they laboured as if they were secure of victory. 
They did not mind stating apparently opposed truths ; 
they knew that they could give to men a higher truth, 
in which the contradictories became two sides of the 
same truth. And when the glorious oratorio of Chris- 
tian truth was sung, with parts for every nation, 
and the chorus rose in which the most diverse found 
themselves in harmony, men said, This is unique in 
the world's history. Heathenism, philosophies, Oriental 
thought, Hebraism, Judaism, have never done work 
like this. 

But what was the crowning truth which completed 
the ideal statue ? — what was the magic word which set 
separated truths flowing together? — what was the 
directing element which harmonised the varied songs 
of truth into a whole ? It was the doctrine, or rather 
the fact, of the Divine Man; the truth of the Word 
made flesh, the fact that God had entered into Man, had 
revealed the Divinity of Man, the Humanity of God. 
This is the central truth of the world. This is the truth 
without which all other truths fall back into their isola- 
tion. This is the key to all the mysteries of life within 



The Central Truth of Christianity . 69 



and life without. This is the axis on which the whole 
sphere of religious truth spins round, without a check, 
in exquisite unity of parts, with exquisite unity of 
purpose ; and this is the essential difference of Chris- 
tianity, the distinctive declaration of Christianity, the 
underived and original conception of Christ. ]STo 
Gentile nation gave it to the world ; no Jewish sages 
brought it forth. It is the only begotten son of Chris- 
tianity. 

It is true, that both east and west sought to realise 
this idea of the unity of the Divine and Human ; 
and it has been said, on the one side, that it was de- 
rived from the Indian religions, and on the other from 
the Greek. 

Let us see if this be true. 

In the East, the Hindoo conceived of God assuming 
the form of man in order to convey truth and to bring 
man to Himself. God condescends to man — so far it 
is Christian. But is it the Christian idea ? It wants 
its very essence, the assumption of the whole nature of 
man into deity. Yishnu, when he returns to heaven, 
lays aside his human nature. Again, there are many 
incarnations of Yishnu, in diverse forms ; there is there- 
fore no true conception of the essential and complete 
unity of God and Man : once done, it would be done 
for ever. Again, as the Hindoo idea developed, its 
underlying thought of the antagonism between the 
divine and the human, the infinite and the unite, grew 
into prominence. We find, when the two are repre- 
sented as coming together, that the human element 
is annihilated^ and the divine Manhood is therefore 



70 The Central Truth of Christianity. 

only apparent, and not real. Hence at last arose the 
Hindoo conception that the perfect spiritual stage of 
any man was only reached when he himself was lost 
as an individual, when his Man's nature was consumed 
in absorption in the Divine. Finally, in Buddhism, 
both God and Man may be said to have perished in 
the idea of the absolute Nothing, or, if we take the 
materialistic view of Buddhism, in the idea of the all- 
containing world. This is not the Christian thought, 
nor is it its source. 

Turn now to the West, take the Greek effort to find 
this unity of the divine and human. The Greek com- 
menced at the other end from the Hindoo. The 
Hindoo began with God, the Greek with man. The 
Hindoo started from the point of entire resignation to 
God ; the Greek from the idea of free self-development. 
By active effort of intellect and soul, man, thought the 
Greek, might attain to union with the Divine, be worthy 
to ascend Olympus. This is directly in opposition to 
the Christian idea, that Man's nature receives the 
divinity through the grace of God, cannot gain it for 
itself. It leaves out the idea of sin and defectiveness 
in man, which is, according to the Christian thought, 
the moving cause of God entering into man. Its end 
is the exaltation of man, the end of Christianity is 
the glorification of God in the exaltation of man. 

Thus, so far as the great typical religions of the 
East and West are concerned, the fountain idea of 
Christianity is underived, original and distinctive. At 
the same time we see plainly that East and West strove 
after it, and that Christianity realises for the first time 



The Central Truth of Christianity. 71 

for them that which they failed to realise for them- 
selves, and realises it so fully that it is only by the 
help of this Christian idea that we can understand the 
true tendency and work of the old religions. 

It is not then in heathenism : is it to be found in 
Hebraism or Judaism ? In both of these forms of the 
religion of the Jews, there is that which heathenism 
wanted — a clear idea of the moral relation between God 
and the world ; but the very clearness of this idea, as 
it divided, in Hebraism, the All-holy God from unholy 
man, stifled the thought that there could be such an 
essential relation between man and God as would make 
their union possible. We can scarcely imagine any 
Hebrew forming out of his religion the idea of Jehovah 
becoming incarnate in man. There was a great gulf 
between man and God. Later on, the wiser Jews, 
feeling this separation and its spiritual pain, sought 
to bridge over the gulf by the ideas of a mediating 
emanation, or of angels who linked the infinite God 
to His finite children; but the end was, that these 
somewhat usurped the idea of God without giving the 
idea of man. Later still, there arose the idea which 
has been now revived, that the revelation of God to 
man was only a general inward revelation of God to 
the spirit; that the divine and human were always 
mingling in the heart of every faithful and righteous 
man. The latter part of the statement holds a truth, 
but the whole is not the Christian idea : first, because 
it renders any incarnation unnecessary for man ; and 
secondly, ' it denies the historical reality of a perfect 
unity of the nature of God and Man in one person. 



72 The- Central Truth of Christianity. 

According to this last Jewish, and modern conception, 
portions of God's nature are being ever united to par- 
ticular men. According to the Christian conception, 
the entire divinity was united to universal Man in 
Christ. It is not only a communication of qualities, it 
is a communication of essence.* 

Thus, the peculiar doctrine of Christianity stanas 
alone, underived, as from heathenism so from Ju- 
daism, but explaining both and fulfilling the wants of 
both ; so that at last, looking back from our standpoint 
in Christianity, we can see that all the religions of the 
world before Christianity were a preparation for Chris- 
tianity, were exhausting all possible ideas that the one 
great idea might stand out in lonely pre-eminence, and 
yet take into its loneliness all the isolated truths of 
the past. 

It is not a just theory, then, which says that Judaism, 
if let alone, would have done the work of Christianity, 
for the main idea of Christianity was not contained in 
Judaism. One might as well say that oxygen and 
hydrogen in the fitting proportions would, if left side 
by side long enough, form water in the end without 
the combining touch of electricity. Whatever may be 
the value of the work of Christianity, centuries of 
Judaism would not have done it. Judaism was in fact 
getting farther and farther away from the possibility 
of arriving at the central idea of Christianity, from 
the working, impelling, regenerating idea of a human 
God. 

* The subject is more fully expanded in the Introduction to Dorner's 
Christology, from which much has here been taken. 



The Central Truth of Christianity. 73 



The organic connection of the lesser truths of Chris- 
tianity with this the greatest, is too great a subject to 
enter npon now. We will close with a restatement of 
what we have said as applied to our personal lives. 

That which Christ did for the previous truths in the 
world, He does for us. We live, before we believe on 
Him, as possessors of isolated religious truths. We hold 
one at one time and another at another time, till par- 
ticular truths, being over-insisted on, grow monstrous, 
and the unity of life is broken. We cannot concentrate 
our impulses to one end, for they need an inner bond of 
thought. One idea contends with another and usurps 
the throne of another. They have no wish to act 
together. Now it is obedience to the moral law which 
rules our conduct, till we drift into Pharisaism ; now it 
is the freedom of the Gospel, till we drift into lawless- 
ness. The truths we have are excellent, but discon- 
nected from their brother- truths they tend to become 
half- truths, and their end is, not uncommonly, either to 
die of spiritual starvation, or to be changed into false- 
hoods. Now, as Christ harmonised and united the 
religious thoughts of the world, so, when He is truly 
received, does He bring the inner life of the soul into 
harmony. Under the reign of his love no truth can 
be pushed too far, for a single truth exclusively dwelt 
on is the parent of fanaticism or persecution. As the 
first principle of his rule of the physical world is order, 
so is it in the spiritual world of our hearts. He allots 
to each quality its work, He brings the truths we 
possess into an ordered phalanx, each one in its place 
and its best place ; and, concentrating these, He inspires 



74 The Central Truth of Christianity, 

them with, his spirit, and drives them in penetrating 
onset against all the evil and falsehood in the soul. 

They act together, because, in their centre, as the 
king of truths, they possess the knowledge that the 
whole nature of Man is united to God. 

But here we pause. What that truth does for us as 
life goes on, and age and failure come ; what it reveals 
when the mountain-pass of death is crossed amid the 
freezing air ; what visions of a glory of the Lord to be 
revealed in Man, when the rose of eternity expands its 
infinitely foliaged cup, where every leaf is a nation and 
the stem which bears them Christ — we leave for the 
present to the future ; it is enough for us to-day, that 
our statue is complete in idea. We have seen the blind 
strivings of the world accomplished in the Incarnation. 
We have seen the o'ermastering attraction with which 
Christ drew all truths into Himself, and concentrated 
in Himself their light, so that indeed He rose upon 
mankind as its universal sun. Let us part with the 
majestic thought, let it be our companion for the 
week. 



The Central Truth of Christianity. 



THE CENTRAL TRUTH OF CHRISTIANITY, 

'And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us,'-— John i. 14. 

t 

The doctrine which we spoke of las t Sunday as the 
distinctive doctrine of Christianity was the doctrine of 
a divine humanity. Whatever else Christianity derived 
from other religions, this at least was underived. What- 
ever else was interwoven into the Christian web from 
the threads spun by Jewish sage, or heathen philoso- 
pher, this was not. It was itself the warp on which the 
whole Christian woof was woven. Both Eastern and 
Western religions had seen this truth of God and Man 
in one, floating, a nebulous dream, before them, and had 
tried to resolve it into the guiding star of their thought, 
but their efforts closed in failure. The Oriental, begin- 
ning with God condescending to man, ended, at the 
very moment when he seemed nearest to the true con- 
ception, in a deification of the universe, in which God 
and man were both lost. The Western, beginning with 
man aspiring to God, found its grave in the Alexandrian 
Platonism, which, rejecting the deified world of the 
Greeks, ended in the conception of one Divine substance 
before which everything finite was only phenomenal, 
not actual. The Greek ended where the Hindoo began. 



J 6 The Central Truth of Christianity. 

The circle of failure was complete.* But the proclama-^ 
tion of the true idea explained the failure, and realised 
the dream. Christ came, and the fountain idea of a true 
union of the Divine and Human broke upwards through 
the mountain-top of the world, and streamed on all 
sides down through the radiating valleys of the nations, 
drawing into itself all the local religious streams, and 
developing from itself new rivers of spiritual ideas. 

Wherever it came, it fertilised the exhausted plains 
of human thought ; wherever it came, new systems of 
thought rose like stately cities on its banks ; wherever 
it came, it was the highway of civilisation, uniting by 
its waters the fresh conceptions of the younger peoples 
to the wise ideas of the older, till both were bound 
together in spiritual commerce on its stream. 

All this has the vagueness of a comparison, but 
there is not a touch in it for which I have not a 
meaning, for to me all Christianity, and all the work 
of Christianity can be directly traced to one central 
source, the fact that in Christ Jesus Humanity was re- 
vealed as divine and Divinity as human ; each side of 
the truth being equally important — the entering of God 
into man, the entering of man into God. This doctrine 
I accept, and for once I must deviate into the first 
person, not on the authority of Church or Bible, but 
because I feel the necessity of it to me. Not that I am 
foolish enough to despise authority. The fact that after 
nearly three hundred years of intellectual labour and 
of spiritual feeling upon this subject, the present doc- 

* See Dorner's Christology, Introduction. 



The Central Truth of Christianity. 77 

trine emerged as a result cannot be without force to 
those who believe not only in the power of man to work 
out truth, but also in the directing influence of a 
Divine Spirit on the world. But authority must be 
kept in its place. It is not the edifice, it is the buttresses 
of the edifice. It does not make a doctrine true to you 
or me, but if we feel a doctrine to be true, it is a support 
and strength to feeling. It is the second, not the first. 
Make it the first, and you must become the bigot 
and the denouncer of all who do not hold your doctrine. 
Make it the second, and you are freed from the dread- 
ful burden of condemning the Theist, and unchristian- 
ising the Unitarian. We feel that the doctrine of the 
Divine humanity of Christ is true. Well, does that 
lead ns to condemn the Theist, or the Unitarian? 
On the contrary, to sympathise with them to a certain 
point, because their essential elements are included in 
the doctrine we believe. We have reached it first 
through Theism, then through Unitarianism, and if we 
denounce either, we denounce the stages through which 
we have attained the higher form. Theism is true, but 
there is a higher truth. To believe in it now as the 
whole of truth appears to us to be an anachronism. 
To hold what it asserts as a part of truth appears to us 
to be a necessity. Unitarianism has a higher truth 
than Theism. Listen to this passage : ' JSTot more 
clearly does the worship of the saintly soul, breathing 
through its window opened to the midnight, betray the 
secrets of its affections, than the mind of Jesus of 
Nazareth reveals the perfect thought and inmost love 
of the All-ruling God. Were he the only born— the 



78 The Central Truth of Christianity. 

solitary self-revelation — of the creative spirit, he could 
not more purely open the mind of heaven ; being the 
very Logos — the apprehensible nature of God — which, 
long unuttered to the world, and abiding in the be- 
ginning with Him, has now come forth and dwelt among 
us, full of grace and truth.' * The line which divides 
that statement from the highest truth we accept of 
Christ's nature is very thin. We accept the statement, 
but, we pass beyond it to a higher conception which 
includes it. Hence I, for one, cannot condemn either 
Theist or Unitarian, without condemning a portion of 
my own belief. 

But what proof is there that the doctrine of which 
you speak is the highest? demands the Theist. No 
proof amounting to demonstration, I answer. But the 
want of the power of demonstrating the truth to others 
is not peculiar to us. Can the Theist demonstrate the 
existence of God ? can the Unitarian, immortality ? ~No ! 
no more than I can the truth of the Incarnation. We 
are all, as persons, thrown upon the witness in our own 
hearts. We can only see that which we have light to 
see. 

But we can approach a decision as to which doctrine 
is the highest by putting certain questions. On which 
theory is the relation of man to God, and of God to man, 
most clearly and most nobly explained ? Which theory 
explains the greatest number of the facts and feelings 
and problems of the spiritual world? From which 
theory follows most easily and most consistently the 

* Endeavours after the Christian Life, vol. ii. p. 349. By James Martineau. 



The Central Truth of Christianity. 79 

great religions ideas common to ns all — the Father- 
hood of God, the nniversal brotherhood of the race, the 
progress of man through evil to final good. Which 
theory has the greatest number of analogies to the 
ideas of the revelation of God in science ? 

On some of these points I have already spoken ; we 
choose only one to-day — the natural development of the 
great religious ideas from the doctrine of the Incarna- 
tion. ♦ 

But first, with regard to the doctrine itself, and the 
place which has been given it. I said that it included 
the truths taught by the Theist and the Unitarian. 

The Theist will reply, It does not include my truth ; 
it denies it by the addition of an untruth. I say that 
God is One ; you say that the One God is Three. 

It is scarcely a fair way of putting it, for we go on to 
say that the Three are One. In terms, at least, we 
aver the unity of God. Our term 6 the three persons ' 
does not mean three distinct and separate beings, but 
three modes of being in one primal Being. We assert, 
that is, a complexity of being in God, in contradistinc- 
tion to the assertion of a unity which seems to us an 
assertion of uniformity of being, not of unity of being. 

Now there is no doubt that the more complex a 
nature is, the higher it is ; and the more uniform it is, 
the lower it is ; and therefore any conception of God 
which represents His being as complex, is higher than 
one which represents His being as uniform. I cannot 
hold the old Hebrew, or the theistic conception of God, 
without feeling that I am far behind the vanward of 
thought, in that position into which a people emerging 



So The Central Truth of Christianity. 

from heathenism would naturally enter, as, for example, 
the Hindoo youth are doing now. My conception of a 
true unity of being, unless the teaching of science 
and of the higher national politics is useless to me, 
must include complexity of being. This is the truth 
which lay hidden in, and gave life to, the errors of 
Polytheism ; and instead of throwing away the whole 
of Polytheism as abominable, I take the root idea of 
it and say, the Being of God is multiform in its oneness. 
I see in Polytheism the unconscious striving of the 
human mind after a higher idea of God than that of the 
Theist. It failed, it developed error after error, but it 
was not useless ; it prepared the world to receive the 
truth which explained and realised its striving — the 
truth of the Trinity in Unity. 

He is at least on the threshold only of metaphysical 
thought who says that a truth which asserts a three- 
fold or fourfold Being in God denies His unity of Being. 
Suppose that the one constant force of the physical 
universe were a living Person. Should I deny his unity 
of Being because I said, he is the force electricity, 
he is the force magnetism, &c. ; and yet he is Force 
alone; he is one and he is twenty; he is twenty* in 
one and one in twenty ? I do not deny unity of Being 
in this case ; on the contrary, I make it more rational, I 
clothe it in higher thought when I maintain its com- 
plexity. 

Again, it is said that the Incarnation is an idea 
degrading to God. 

Surely there may be another aspect of the question. 
Is it apart from a noble conception of God that He 



The Central Truth of Christianity. 8 1 

should desire to partake of the lives of His creatures 
for the loving 1 purpose of comprehending them more 
perfectly ? 

But it is replied, that God without that does com- 
prehend us perfectly in Himself ? In thought, yes, but 
in experience, no. God is impassible, absolute, infinite. 
How is He, with all His love, to comprehend in Himself 
a life like ours, which is relative, full of suffering, and 
finite ? This was the religious difficulty of the ancient 
world. We saw last Sunday how they strove to solve 
it by endeavouring to bring God and man into unity. 
They failed to do it, but they felt that it was necessary. 

There seems thus an intellectual necessity for the 
Incarnation. Moreover, instead of jarring against our 
idea of God, the Incarnation seems not only natural, 
but delightful to conceive. How often have we our- 
selves, when affection for the lower creation has been 
kindled in us, desired in idea to enter into their life 
for a time, and then to return into ourselves again 
with a new consciousness of a lower life than our own, 
and with increased ability and desire to help. And if 
we have felt this towards a nature not kindred to our 
own, how much more may God have felt it towards a 
nature in direct kinship with Himself? 

It is a noble thought : it ought to commend itself to 
all who have ever loved purely and passionately, and 
desired to become at one with the being of those they 
loved. 

I feel that God desires to be born into the being of 
all the intelligent creatures that He has made, and 
I ask, with reverence, how do we know that He has not 



82 The Central Truth of Christianity. 



incarnated Himself in other beings than in Man ? If 
other intelligent and spiritual, but defective beings, 
live elsewhere in the universe, it may be that the In- 
carnation on our earth is not an isolated fact ; it may 
be that in His manifold unity there may be many 
creature-consciousnesses. Trinity in unity is the ex- 
pression of the eternal nature of the Being of Gcd in 
its relation to us. But the Being of God may be 
infinitely more complex than that. We may learn here- 
after that our phrase is but a poor expression of the 
thousand modes of Being in the unity of God, that the 
Incarnation has many analogies in the universe. 

It does not seem irreverent to make these specula- 
tions. Irreverence exists in the intention, and the in- 
tention here is to exalt and not to lower our idea of 
the nature of God. 

But what we have to do with is this — the idea of the 
union of God and man as the central truth of the 
highest religion. We dwelt last Sunday on its unique- 
ness, we have suggested to-day its naturalness ; we 
proceed to show how easily there flows^from it the three 
great religious ideas of the world. 

And 'first, the idea of the Fatherhood of God. Ac- 
cording to our doctrine, God, in Christ, has taken all 
mankind into Himself as a dependent part of His 
Being. That is the idea, and it depends on this — that 
Christ, in our belief, was not only a man but Man — 
the realisation in one Person of the whole idea which 
God had of Man, so that while He represents us each 
to ourselves as we ought to be, He also represents and 
has taken the whole of the race into God. In God, 



i 



The Central Truth of Christianity. S3 

therefore, there is now the perfect Man, real to Him, 
ideal to us. Man in the eternal and actual world is 
one and eternal; but on earth and in time he is im- 
perfect, and divided into many men in different stages 
of development. These several parts of the great 
whole which is to be, must, if our doctrine be true, 
be brought up to the level of the ideal Man which 
exists in God. God is bound to them in thought as 
He is .bound to His own nature; and as He is a 
Person, and they are persons, that binding relation 
is a personal relation, the relation of a loving Thinker 
to the thing thought, the relation of a loving Creator 
to the thing created. A relation, therefore, of edu- 
cation, of infinite care and pity, of redemption ; the 
relation of a Father to an erring child, who, seen as 
what he will be, not as what he is, is not looked upon 
by God as outside Himself, but felt, since he has been 
united to all men in Christ, as a part of Himself. This 
conception makes the Fatherhood of God a glorious 
reality ; makes all the duties which belong to Father- 
hood imperative upon God by His loving act of Incar- 
nation. 

But since God has been united in Christ — not to a few, 
but to the whole of the human race — this Fatherhood 
is necessarily universal. All doctrines of favouritism 
are at once expelled by this ; all despair of races is at 
once destroyed; all hopelessness for those who suffer, 
and those who are evil, perishes ; all contempt of our 
brother-men is no more, for all men are divine in God 
since they have been in Christ. 

Then comes a crowd of other religious ideas derived 



84 The Central Truth of Christianity. 

as naturally from tliis as rivers from a fountain. For 
there follows, if the same belief be true, the necessary 
immortality of all mankind. Men are not becoming 
immortal ; they are, since all mankind has been united 
to God, immortal now. Death, annihilation, must touch 
God Himself ere it can touch the meanest human soul, 
for all the race is hid in Christ, and Christ is hid in 
God. 

So, also, the dreadful dream that anyone can. be for 
ever exiled from God and buried in ever-enduring evil 
passes away and ceases to sit as a nightmare on the 
bosom of religion. For if all men are in idea, and by 
right of Christ, contained in God, all men are in idea 
and by right holy. Do you think that God will fall 
short of His own conception ? do you think that having 
once seen the whole race as separate from sin in 
Christ, He can for one moment endure the thought that 
any one man or woman should be left for ever to the 
horrible embrace of evil? That men should contend 
with evil we can understand, that they should suffer 
we can bear, that they should wander far from their 
Father's house and waste their immortal substance we 
can endure, for they are then treated as free subjects 
who must develope by effort and through failure ; but 
that all this should be done without an end except a 
cruel end, that all the pains God takes with us (and 
surely if anything is plain to the worst of us, that 
is) should be cast as rubbish to the void; that He 
should have descended to assume the nature of all men, 
and made it divine in Himself, only to cast away as 
refuse to be burned the greater part of those whom 



The Central Truth of Christianity. 85 



He had made holy in Himself — all this does now so 
contradict and vilify His revelation, that it is no 
wonder that the idea of everlasting damnation should 
have destroyed men's belief in the idea of the Incar- 
nation. He who believes the one cannot rationally, 
though he may blindly, believe in the other. No ; 
the Incarnation, rightly conceived, necessitates the 
final righteousness, godlikeness of all. How long the 
making righteous may endure, none can tell ; but through 
sphere after sphere of just retribution, through the 
change of the outward sensuality of earth into inward 
suffering, through the change of the miserable circum- 
stances of earth into happy circumstances — for I often 
think that what many a poor criminal wants to make 
him right is not punishment so much as comfort — step 
by step, age after age, in world after world perhaps, 
all the past dead are moving on, all the future dead will 
move on, a mighty stream, to mingle in the ocean of 
the righteousness of God on that far-off but certain 
day when the idea of the Incarnation of God in the 
essential Man will be completely realised — that hour 
to which the Apostle, in a lofty flight of inspiration, 
looked forward when he said, 6 And when all things 
shall be subdued unto Him, then shall the Son also 
Himself be subject unto Him that put all things under 
Him, that God may be all in all.' 

On the last of the great religious conceptions which 
follow inflexibly from the fact of God in Man — the 
conception of an equal and universal brotherhood of 
the race — I have # often dwelt from this place. It is 
sufficient to say now that its practical results are as 



86 The Central Truth of Christianity. 



important as they are many. It is the foundation of all 
effort to civilise barbarian peoples ; it is the root and end 
of all noble legislation, of all just government. It is the 
inspiring impulse of the theory and practice of national 
education; it is the mainspring of all charity ; it is the 
fountain from which flow all redemptive measures for the 
outcast and the criminal ; it is the principle on which 
all the relations of capital and labour should be based ; 
it is the idea which overthrows all tyrannies, all oppres- 
sion, all slavery^ all exclusive castes, all class domina- 
tion, all attempts to concentrate all the land and all 
the money of a country in the hands of a few. It has 
been the war-cry and the watchword of all noble revo- 
lution. It is leading the peoples of the world, slowly 
but surely, to a political future of equality, for religious 
conceptions are naturally and necessarily transferred to 
political ; it is leading the various nations of the World 
to a far-off international union, on a higher ground than 
that of commercial interest. It will finally end in the 
destruction of all international and individual envying, 
strife, vainglorying, and trickery to get the upper hand ; 
and in the establishment of a unity of mankind in 
which all shall be equal, free, and fraternal, and yet all 
diverse and individual, so that the unity of the human 
race in some sort, like the unity of God, will exist in 
the midst, and because of an infinite manifoldness. 

Lastly, these three great Christian ideas of the Father- 
hood of God, the progress of the race towards final 
good, and the brotherhood of all men, are, like the idea 
out of which they are born, underiv<ed from any other 
teaching, and original to Christianity. No Eastern or 



The Central Truth of Christianity. 8 7 

Western religion taught them, no Jewish sages conceived 
them in anything like a practical form, in anything like 
their full extent. We find as it were filmy phantoms of 
them here and there, we do not find their substances 
Christ sent them forth to run as living fire through the 
world, and their life is derived from the fact of the 
union in Him of God and Man. 

It is no answer to say that they have been shamefully 
misrepresented, practically denied by Christians in the 
history of the Christian Church ; that they have often 
found their exponents in men called infidels and atheists. 
Whoever used them, Christ gave them ; and they lead 
the world. Nor can we charge upon Christianity their 
slow advance, their comparative failure as yet to accom- 
plish their work, their caricatures. Great ideas are 
slow of fulfilment ; great ideas are especially liable to 
caricature, great ideas are subject to great failures on 
their way to victory, and all in proportion to their 
greatness. 

We may expect their slow development. 6 The Lord 
our God is one Lord.' How long did the Jewish people 
take to learn that ? Nearly a thousand years. One of 
the first things we have to learn, if our judgment of the 
progress of the race is ever to be just, is that Chris- 
tianity, and mankind with it, must move forward into 
fulness of truth almost as slowly as the earth into fitness 
for man. 

We may expect that monstrous caricatures will be 
made out of them by men insisting on portions of 
them torn away from their whole; we may expect 
that they will be made the ministers of the exclusive- 



88 



The Central Truth of Christianity. 



ness and intolerance they came to destroy ; we may 
expect that they will be driven into extremes ; but 
instead of crying out failure on Christianity, we should 
realise that these things are natural, that ideas when 
first sown, or when first reclothed in new forms, are 
almost always carried beyond their golden mean by the 
excitement which they create ; that it seems to be a law 
that before ideas are clearly seen as they are, men must 
exhaust all their possible excesses and defects, must 
experience all their wrong forms before they can grasp 
their essence. 

Such at least has been, and often will be in the future, 
the fate of the Christian ideas. But they still endure, 
rising out of all error and mistake, like Alpine summits 
after tempest, pure, and clean, and fair. They still live 
under a thousand forms, the elements of life and move- 
ment in mankind — the Fatherhood of God, the progress 
of man through evil to eternal good, the brotherhood of 
the race. These are the leading rays which stream from 
the Sun of Christianity — the idea of the union of Man- 
hood and Godhead in Christ. 



Tlie Beauty of Christ 's Character. 



THE BEAUTY OF CHRIST'S CHARACTER. 
i Thine eyes shall see the King in his beauty.' — Isaiah xxxiii, 17. 

Within the last ten years, the human nature of Christ 
has been brought prominently forward in England. 
This has been due partly to the more direct historical 
interest awakened in his life by a book like that of 
Strauss, partly to various foreign studies of his life 
from the merely biographical point of view ; partly to 
the influence of Unitarians like Channing on our 
Church, and partly to that of some of our own teachers. 

A great deal has been done to present Him more 
vividly and more historically before us, but we cannot 
say that enough has been done. There have been but 
few attempts to trace in Him those subtile shades of 
feeling, those finer touches of intellectual and poetic 
sentiment, which, after all, make a man real to us. It 
is on these I propose to dwell for some Sundays : less 
on the moral majesty, and more on the exquisiteness of 
his character ; less on the suffering lover of man, and 
more on the King in his beauty. So doing, we may 
add something to our conception of his individuality. 
For when men tell us of his life, .and describe his death, 
and dwell upon his love, He remains still a vague outline 
5 



go The Beauty of Chris fs Character. 

to many of us ; but when He stops by the wayside and 
the women cluster round Him, and He stoops to lay 
Lis band on the children's heads and claim them for his 
own and for his kingdom ; or when, resting by the well, 
He wakes the uncultured woman's interest by half- 
mysterious sayings, tinged with something of the So- 
cratic irony, but with greater solemnity and profounder 
meaning than that of the Sage of Athens — then his 
personality begins to shape itself within us. We recog- 
nise the uniqueness which belongs to a living character. 
It is by dwelling on these things, and by an analysis of 
character based upon them, that we may arrive at a 
deeper, as well as a more critical, knowledge of the 
intense and universal character of his Human Nature. 

In mediseval times this humanisation of Christ for 
men was done by art. The exquisite simplicity and 
naturalness of frescoes, such as those in the Arena 
Chapel, brought Christ and his life home to men's 
minds. But though natural, these representations did 
not dwell enough on the distinctly human traits in his 
life. Series like Giotto's were connected with doctrine, 
and so far, removed from simple humanity. They grew 
still more doctrinal afterwards, till, from step to step of 
idealisation, the Manhood of Christ grew fainter and 
fainter in art, and He became only Divine and clothed 
with the terrors of Divinity. 

But in the thirteenth century, also, the Dominicans 
and Franciscans seized on the Passion of Christ as the 
special object of religious emotion in his life, and taking 
that piece of his Manhood out of the rest, concentrated 
men's minds on it alone. Art at once began to supply 



The Beauty of Christ's Character. 9 1 

tlie religious demand for representations of the days of 
the Passion, and the people, taught as much by the 
paintings as by the preachers, saw the Manhood of 
Christ only as a suffering manhood. The rest of his 
human life passed into all but absolute extinction in 
the intense light which was thrown upon the Passion. 
Later on, the natural conclusion followed upon this 
isolation of one part of Christ's human life in art. He 
became only a fine head or a noble figure in the centre 
of a picture. He was painted only as a good subject 
around which artists could throw a poetical or aesthetic 
air. All awe, all faith, all sublimity, all touch of what 
was Divine in Him passed away when the last trace of 
his pure and natural Manhood was lost in art. Por 
they go together. 

There are many curious analogies in theology to this 
limitation in art of the idea of Christ's Manhood. I 
will only dwell upon a few. After the reformation, and 
almost up to the present day, Christ, as a inan> has 
been continually more and more hidden from us by the 
accumulation of theological doctrines round Him. Our 
theologians have$ like the artists, taken^ Him farther 
and farther from earth, and isolated Him in his divinity 
in heaven. We had no Virgin to fall back upon, and 
the result was that English Christianity was severed 
more and more from natural human life ; and I do not 
know what might have happened had it not been for 
the ceaseless protest of the Unitarians, which rose at 
last into the spiritual beauty of the figure of Christ as 
presented to us by Channing. 

But this is not the only analogy. As art, by insisting 



92 The Beauty of Christ's Character. 

only on the Passion, put out of sight the rest of 
Christ's life, and produced a maimed representation of 
his humanity, so did, and so do those theologians, 
whether Evangelical or Anglican, who dwell too exclu- 
sively on .the atonement, the death, and the sacrifice of 
the Passion. The result was and is, that Christianity has 
been so much made into a religion of suffering, endu- 
rance, sacrifice, and asceticism, that all that side of 
human life which has to do with healthy, natural joy, 
with love of beauty, with what is called profane poetry 
and art, with delight in natural scenery, 'with social 
companionship, has been, to a large extent, left un- 
christianised, relegated to the realm of the irreligious. 

The result of both these tendencies is similar to that 
which followed in arfc, and is seen in the way in which 
the c Life of Jesus ' by Eenan was taken up in England. 
In a certain sense, that book brought back to reality 
the human life of Christ, but it was only as a good sub- 
ject for a piece of artistic work ; He was surrounded by 
all the faded feebleness of Arcadian sentiment ; He was 
the human figure which enlivened pictorial descriptions 
of Palestine ; his character was made to lose, in the 
midst of a detestable sentimentalism, all moral sub- 
limity. 

Let me pursue the analogy one step further. Among 
all the artists who represented Christ's life, one stands 
alone for his unique, unconventional, and manifold 
treatment of it and its subject. Others have repre- 
sented Him in the common humanities of his life, but 
they have lacked the power to give with equal grandeur 
the awful moments in which his mission was concen- 



The Beatity of Christ's Character. 93 

trated. Others have represented Him ideally and. with 
sublimity, but they have not been able to touch such 
subjects as the Supper at Cana without either making- 
it too ideal or too vulgar. One man alone has mingled, 
and without a trace of effort, and with a profound con- 
ception at the root of his work, the heavenly with the 
earthly, the divine with the human, the common with 
the wonderful, the poetical with the prose of daily life, 
in his representation of the human existence of Christ. 
That man was Tintoret. In his 6 Last Supper,' for ex- 
ample, it is a common room in which the Apostles and 
the Master meet. Servants hurry to and fro ; the evening- 
has fallen dark, and the lamps are lit ; those who eat 
the meal are really fishermen and unlearned men ; here 
and there there are incidents which prove that the 
artist wished to make us feel that it was just such a 
meal as was eaten that night by everyone else in Jeru- 
salem. We are in the midst of common human life. 

But, the upper air of the chamber is filled with a drift 
of cherubim, and the haze of the lamp-light takes that 
azure tint with which the artist afterwards filled the 
recesses of the 6 Paradise,' and the whole soft radiance 
of the light falls on and envelopes the upright figure of 
Christ, worn and beautiful, and bending down to offer 
to one of his disciples the broken bread. It is common 
human life filled with the Divine. It is the conception 
of Christ's personality which modern theology ought to 
possess, because it ought to be the ideal of our own 
life. 

Nor at the right time is sublimity and awfulness 
wanted in Tintoret's conception of Christ's humanity. 



94 The Beaitty of Chris? s Character. 

We pass in his work from the lonely majesty of the 
temptation in the wilderness to the unapproachable 
agony and solemnity of the burdened head, bowed with 
the sorrow of the whole world, of the Christ of the Cru- 
cifixion, and from thence to the high sovereignty, yet 
homelike tenderness, of the Christ of the e Paradise,' and 
we know as we realise the painter's idea that we look 
on one in whom the human nature of the whole race 
has realised that divine glory of self-surrender for 
mankind and conquest of evil which demands of our 
hearts the deepest love restrained by the deepest awe. 

But when we pass to pictures of Tintoret which repre- 
sent the senators and merchants of Venice presented 
to Christ, we do not find the Saviour as the unapproach- 
able Divinity, but as the friend and lover of man. He 
comes down through the air with expanded arms and 
joyous welcome, not to judge or to rebuke, but to live 
among his servants, his face full of delightful human 
feeling, rejoicing that He can in entire sympathy take 
a share in their daily work, and bless their common 
life. 

This mingled conception of divine majesty and human 
friendliness, of heavenly power and earthly homefulness, 
is the conception of Christ's humanity which we want 
to arrive at now, and we are drawing towards it day by 
day. One step was made towards it by the work of one 
whose honoured age is still with us when he instilled into 
the whole of modern theology the thought of Christ as 
the federal Head 6f mankind, as being Himself the con- 
tainer of mankind, as the incarnation of the humanity 
which has for ever been in God. That idea secured 



The Beauty of Christ's Characte?'. 95 

for the man Christ Jesus, and secured for ever, our wor- 
ship and our awe. It separated Him from the race as 
king ; it bound Him up with the race as brother ; it 
made mankind live and move and breathe in God. 

But more was wanted, and is wanted. We want a 
Christ entirely one with all that is joyous, pure, 
healthy, sensitive, aspiring, and even what seems to us 
commonplace in daily life ; we desire Him, while He 
is still our King, to be also 6 not too bright and good 
for human nature's daily food,' for business and for 
home; we wish Him to share in our anxieties about our 
children ; to come and hallow our early love, and bless 
with a further nobleness all its passion ; to move us to 
quietude and hope within the temple of the past where 
our old age wanders and meditates ; to be with us when 
our heart swells with the beauty of the world, and to give 
his sympathy to us in that peculiar passion ; to whisper 
of aspiration in our depression, of calm in our excitement, 
to be, in fine, a universal friendly presence in the whole 
of our common life. 

I believe that out of that will spring no diminution of 
reverence to Him, no unhappy familiarity, but rather 
that deepening of awe, that solemnity of love which arise 
towards One whom we have lived with daily, and never 
known to fail in the power — sweetest of all, in a world 
where so much seems mean and commonplace — of 
lifting the prosaic into the poetic by the spirit of love, 
of giving us the sense of greatness in things which seem 
the smallest, of making life delightful with the feeling 
that we are being educated through its slightest details 
into children of the Divine Holiness. 



96 The Beauty of Christ's Character. 

If in the rest of this sermon and for some Sundays to 
come we can reverently enter into the finer shades of 
the human character of Christ, we shall gain — I trust 
without losing the awe which belongs to Him as Divine 
— a deeper sense of his union with our nature mingled 
with a love to Him at once more delicate and home- 
like. 

I speak, then, of the beauty of Christ's character as 
my main subject ; and for the rest of this morning's work 
only of one element in it — of his sensibility ; a word I 
prefer to sensitiveness, for it includes sensitiveness. 
Sensitiveness is the power of receiving impressions, 
whether from nature or man, vividly, intensely, and yet 
delicately. Sensibility is this passive quality of sensi- 
tiveness with activity of soul in addition exercised 
upon the impressions received. The more perfect the 
manhood, the more perfect is this sensibility. The pos- 
session of it in a high degree is the chief source of 
beau by of character as distinguished from greatness of 
character ; and yet without it no character can reach 
the highest greatness. The total absence of it is the 
essence, the inmost essence, of vulgarity. The presence 
of it in its several degrees endows its possessor, accord- 
ing to the proportion of it, with what Chaucer meant 
by c gentilness. 5 Now, when we talk of the perfect 
manhood of Christ, and never consider this side of his 
nature, we must be making a grave omission — an omis- 
sion which removes from our view half of the more 
subtile beauty of his character. 

It does not seem wrong to say that there was in Him 
the sensibility to natural beauty. It has always been 



The Beauty of Christ's Character. 97 

my pleasure to think that He also, like us, wished and 
sought that nature should send ' its own deep quiet to 
restore his heart. 5 It cannot be without reason that, 
when He was wearied and outdone, He called to his 
disciples to go away into a desert place to rest awhile ; 
that when Jerusalem was loud in his ears, He oftimes 
resorted to the glades of Gethsemane ; that when He 
desired to pray, He went alone into the hills ; that when 
He felt the transfiguration glory coming upon Him, He 
ascended the lofty side of Hermon; that when He 
taught, it was by preference by the waves of Galilee, 
or walking through the corn-fields on the Sabbath, or 
on the summit of some grassy hill. We know that He 
had watched the tall c lilies ' arrayed more gloriously 
than Solomon ; that He had marked the reed shaken in 
the wind, and the tender green of the first shoot of the 
fig-tree. We find hie common teaching employed about 
the vineyard, and the wandering sheep, and the whiten- 
ing corn, and the living well, the summer rain, and the 
wintry flood and storm. These and many more would 
not have been so often connected with his action and 
so ready on his lips had not He loved them well, and 
received their impressions vividly. 

There are those to whom this thought may have no 
value, but to others the character of a perfect man wants 
this to make it beautiful, and beauty is of necessity ail 
element of perfectness. It is true that the beauty which 
comes of this sensibility to Nature is not so profoundly 
tender and varied as that which comes of sensibility to 
human feeStg, but it is calmer, perhaps more sublime : 
there is a glory of purity in it and of passion un- 



98 The Beauty of Christ's Character. 

deformed by evil, which, makes the character which pos- 
sesses it spiritual, not only with the spirituality which 
unites the spirit to its heavenly Father, hut also with 
that which unites the imagination and the intellect to 
that part of the being of God which moves in and 
is revealed by the beauty and order of the universe. 

To many men who have the poetic temperament, 
who see as much in a flower as in a book of genius, to 
exclude Christ from all this region is to separate them 
from Christianity ; to find Him truly there is to hallow 
their love of Nature and their work therein, and to fill 
with, a diviner air those moments of communion with 
the universe, when thought is not, but only inspiration. 

But still higher in Him was that intense sensibility 
to human feeling, which made Him by instinct know, 
without the necessity of speech, the feelings of those 
He met. 

This is the highest touch of beauty in a character. 
What is it which most charms us in a friend ? It is 
that he can read the transient expression on our face 
and modify himself to suit the feeling we are ourselves 
but half conscious of possessing; it is that he knows 
when to be silent and when to speak ; it is that he 
never mistakes, but sees us true when all the world is 
wrong about us ; it is that he can distinguish the 
cynicism of tenderness from that of malice, and believe 
our love though we choose to mask our heart. 

Such a friend has not only power of character but 
beauty of character. Who is it who is most haunted in 
society, around whom people collect as arouftd a perfect 
picture ? It is that man or woman who, from sensi- 



The Beauty of Christ's Character. 99 

bility to the feeling of others, knows how to develope in 
the noblest way each personality, whose mediating 
charity and sympathy bring into musical accord the 
several characters of their society, till, all having been 
lured to do what each can do best, they learn to work 
happily and live happily together. 

This is another element of the beautiful character, 
and the root of its beauty is sensibility which worketh 
by love, and delights in its own power. 

He saw Nathanael in the early days coming to Him 
from the garden and the fig-tree. He looked upon the 
simple and earnest face, and recognised the long effort 
of the man to be true. In a moment He frankly 
granted the meed of praise : 6 Behold an Israelite in- 
deed, in whom there is no guile. 5 A few words more, 
in which Christ went home to the secret trials of the 
man, and Nathanael was his for ever. 

He met Peter in the morning light, and seeing 
through all the surface impetuosity of his character 
deep into the strength of his nature, called him Cephas, 
the man of rock, on whose powerful character the 
infant Church should be built. And Peter, catching 
inspiration from the word, saw a new life opening 
before him and began to believe in his own power ; too 
much at first and for some years, till, in the hour of 
bitter failure, the transient force of self-confidence 
melted away before the last look of his Master, and 
the diviner strength which flows from penitence fulfilled 
the prediction of Christ. 

When the woman who was a sinner knelt at his 
sacred feet and wept, Christ felt the thrill of con- 



ioo The Beauty of Christ's Character. 

tempt which ran from guest to guest, and felt how 
bitterly it smote "upon the woman's soul. He turned, 
and in an exquisite reproof rebuked the scorn, shamed 
the scorners, and redeemed the woman by recognition 
of her tenderness. Fallen, shamed, the exile of the 
world, she was born into a noble life when those words 
fell upon her ear : 6 Her sins which are many are for- 
given her, for she loved much.' When the malefactor 
on the cross appealed to Him, Christ saw at once 
that the fountain of a noble life had begun to flow. 
Without an instant's hesitation. He claimed its waters 
for Paradise. When the persistency of Thomas refused 
to believe without a sign, another teacher might have 
been angry. Christ penetrated to the inner honesty 
which prompted the scepticism and vouchsafed a reply 
of love. It struck home, and the Apostle's heart was 
broken into adoration. It was the same with bodies 
of men as with men. He wove into one instrument of 
work the various characters of the Apostles, making 
them harmonise with and understand each other. How 
did He hold together those vast multitudes day by 
day? By feeling their hearts within his own. How 
did He shame and confute his enemies ? By an instinct 
of their objections and their whispers, so that He re- 
plied to their thoughts before they were spoken. Men, 
women, and children, all who were natural, unconven- 
tional, simple in love, and powerful in faith, ran to 
Him as a child to its mother. They felt the beauty 
of character which was born of sensibility to human 
feeling and spiritual wants, and they were bound to Him 
for ever. 



The Beauty of Christ's Character. 101 

This, then, is tlie Founder of a religion for man, 
a religion not onlj of the inner and mystical life of 
the spirit, but also a religion of feeling and imagina- 
tion ; which talks not only of sin, and suffering, and 
redemption, but which has entered, in its Author's life, 
into those finer touches of sense, and those remoter 
haunts of imagination which are at once the minis- 
trants and the children of a high culture ; which, 
taking its impulse from the natural instinct of Christ 
to penetrate by feeling into the lives and hearts of men 
and catch their fleeting impressions, and to do this for 
all men — so that He saw the beautiful and the strange 
in men who seemed to others commonplace— has ena- 
bled us, using his instrument of love, to grow ourselves 
beautiful in character from continual discovery and 
vision of the beautiful in others ; till gaining his power 
of seeing in nature the ever-changing forms of one 
Divine beauty, and of seeing in man, beneath all evil, 
the unalterable traits of that image of the heavenly 
which Christ revealed, we grow up into somewhat of 
his loveliness of character, and begin to look forward 
with a strange, new exultation to the fulfilment of 
that ancient promise : 6 Thine eyes shall see the King 
in his beauty.' 



102 Tlie Beauty of Christ's Character. 



THE BEAUTY OF CHRIST S CHARACTER. 
1 Thine eyes shall see the King in his beauty.' — Isaiah xxxiii. 17. 

There is a difference between the worthiness and the 
beauty of a character. A man's acts and thoughts may 
have worth to kindle respect, but not to touch the 
imagination with that peculiar pleasure which is de- 
rived from the reception of beauty. They are like the 
reading of honourable prose ; whereas the same acts and 
thoughts by a character which is beautiful as well as 
worthy, are like the reading of noble poetry. We con- 
tinue to read the character of Christ to-day, not for its 
worth especially, but distinctly for the poetic beauty 
which adorns its worth. 

The first of its beautiful elements we found to be sensi- 
bility, and we described how intense it was with regard 
to impressions received from nature and from man. 
But we especially said that this sensibility was neces- 
sarily active in a perfect character. It seeks, and that 
with passion, to clothe and to realise itself in an out- 
ward form. We discussed it in itself last Sunday. 
Our object to-day will be to investigate it in action in 
the words and deeds of Christ. A certain amount of 
repetition of thought will naturally mark what we have 



The Beauty of Christ's Character. 103 

to say, but the thoughts will be repeated from a new 
point of view and in a new form. 

Sensibility to nature and man, in action, is sym- 
pathy with nature and man, and it is plain that unless 
the former passes into and completes itself in the 
latter, it soon ceases to be an element of beauty in 
character. For nothing is really beautiful which does 
not grow, or change, or give us the impression of vital 
energy either within itself or employed upon it. This 
is doubly true when the beauty spoken of is not phy- 
sical beauty, but belonging to a living character like 
that of Christ. 

First, then, we have to trace, as delicately and as 
reverently as we can, how the sensibility of Christ to 
the beauty of nature became active as sympathy with 
nature. 

There are many who possess the former, but who 
never employ either intellect or imagination on the 
impressions which they receive through its means., 
Eemaining passive, they permit the tide of this world's 
beauty to flow in and flow out again of their mind 
without the exercise of any thought upon it. We feel 
that that sort of passive unintelligent reception is 
uglier in a character than the absence of any sensi- 
bility at all. For we are made conscious of a moral 
wrong done by these persons to their own character. 
They might have made so much of their native power 
of receptiveness ; they have done nothing with it. It 
is true that Wordsworth, in whom this sensibility was 
very great, speaks of a e wise passiveness,' and of sur- 
rendering ourselves at times to those lessons of the 



104 The Beauty of Christ's Character. 

universe which come of themselves, without our seek- 
ing. But this is only at times. No man was ever 
more active than Wordsworth about the impressions 
derived from his sensibility to natural beauty. He 
gave himself up to them, but it was that they might 
change, as they flowed in, the whole landscape of his 
soul ; that his imagination might, under their influence, 
become continually active in new directions of thought 
and feeling. And nothing is more remarkable in 
Wordsworth, whose poems are the record of his life, 
than the way in which impressions, passively received, 
became vital and creative forces in him, when he added 
to them the force of his own imagination. So great 
was this, that we might almost say that at every hour 
of his daily walk among the hills, he became a new- 
created man, was different in character from that which 
he had been the previous hour. His sensibility to 
nature translated itself into so passionate a sympathy 
with nature, that he felt towards wood and hill and 
stream as he would towards persons whom he loved. 
The result was that he became creative ; each feeling- 
took form as a poem. 

The beauty of all this in a character is the impres- 
sion of life and change it gives, united to the im- 
pression of human power in noble intellectual action. 

Eow, obscure as are the hints we possess with regard 
to the sensibility of Christ to impressions received 
from nature, yet we have enough recorded to show us 
that the same activity of sensibility which belongs to 
the poetic nature belonged to Him. 

You remember that passage, when, as He walked 



The Beauty of Christ's Character. 105 

silently along, He suddenly lifted up his eyes and saw 
the fields whitening already to harvest. He received 
the impression in a passive mood. It changed the 
whole current of his thoughts, and the whole state of 
his soul. Immediately thought seized on the change 
worked within Him by the impression and expressed it 
in words. It marks a beautiful character to be so 
rapidly and delicately impressed, but the beauty of the 
character becomes vital beauty when the man, through 
utter sympathy with and love of what he feels, be- 
comes himself creative of new thought. 

Again: the poet, in hours when he is not in the 
passive mood, makes his sensibility active through the 
combining, modifying, and life-conferring work of the 
imagination. The impressions received are contrasted 
with one another, or composed into unity, or shaped 
into a vital form. But though they suffer these changes, 
and are made into the form of a poem, whiclj, contains, 
but is different from, the impressions, the poem itself 
does not become out of harmony with the natural beauty 
which suggested it. On the contrary, it has a reflex 
action on the impressions which caused it, and gives 
them deeper meaning ; and it enables us to penetrate 
below the surface-beauty of the world, and to find there 
a spiritual loveliness. It gets into the inner being of 
nature and explains it. The poet's sensibility to nature 
becomes active as personal sympathy with, the living 
soul of nature. 

This also*we find in the character of Christ. Take 
a single instance. In an active mood — for He was 
teaching — He saw a corn-field by the shore of the lake 5 



i.o6 The Beatify of Christ's Character. 

and a number of images streamed into his mind. He 
looked on tlie whole career of the corn-field — the sowing 
of the seed, the beaten path through the midst, the 
seed downtrodden by the passengers and gathered up 
by the birds, the rich harvest in the good soil, the blades 
of wheat choked by the rough thicket at the edge, and 
towards the hill-slope the patches of withered corn 
over the shelving rock, where the earth lay loose and 
thin. 

In a moment all the impressions were taken up by 
the imagination, and combined into the parable of the 
sower. They were carried into the spiritual world. 
They were shaped into a picture of human life, with its 
temptations, and its struggles, and its end. 

They were gathered up into a poem, which gave 
back to nature the impressions received, in a new form, 
which clothed the natural scene with new beauty, and 
went below its surface into its hidden meaning. 

This could only be done by sensibility to nature 
becoming sympathy with that inward being of nature 
which is the image of the Thought of God. And, indeed, 
we meet again and again in his teaching, touches of 
thought which make us feel that, to the Saviour, all 
the world was not dead but a living thing, informed 
and penetrated by God. Again and again, the king- 
dom of God is spoken of as symbolised by the growth 
of the tree, by the development of the seed, by the 
fermentation of the leaven; the character of God, 
by the shining of the sun and the falling *of the rain 
upon evil and good alike; the dealings of God with 
man, by the dealings of the gardener with the fig-tree. 



The Beauty of Christ's Character. 107 

of the shepherd with the sheep ; the spiritual union of 
His people with Himself, by the union of the vine- 
branch with the vine, by the assimilation of bread and 
wine with the body for strength and comfort. Every- 
where it is the perfection of sensibility to natural 
impressions in its activity as sympathy with the being 
of nature. Everywhere, as we read, we become con- 
scious of the beauty of the character which translated, 
by its own Divine vitality, mere sensibility into sensi- 
bility as sympathy, mere feeling into living thought. 

Once more, on this subject. Sensibility to beautiful 
natural impressions, when it is inactive, does not dis- 
tinguish clearly between these impressions. It has no 
distinctiveness in its praise ; it has only one feeling for 
all the different aspects of the world. As such, it at 
once becomes inert, degraded, an element of ugliness 
in a character. We all know how wearisome is his 
enthusiasm who parades the same stock of phrases, who 
knows not when to give the praise of silence, nvhose 
feelings are the same, whether he look on a peaceful 
landscape or on an Alpine valley, who has the same 
undiscerning delight in the beauty of a rose or the 
beauty of a violet. This is sensibility degraded by 
laziness into a deformity in a character. We turn away 
displeased and pained. 

The true sensibility becoming sympathy, sympathises 
with the distinct nature of each thing it feels, divides 
each thing from all the rest, gives to each a dif- 
ferent praise, feels for each a different feeling, and 
harmonises itself with the tone of each impression. 
This is one of the highest qualities of the poet. It is 



108 The Beauty of Christ's Character. 

to be found in the character of Christ, and it gives to 
it a peculiar and delicate beauty. 

We find it suggested in the perfect appositeness of the 
illustrations He drew from nature to the thoughts He 
desires to illustrate. ' Consider the lilies of the field, 
how they grow ; they toil not, neither do they spin : and 
yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory 
was not arrayed like one of these.' Can anything be 
more exquisite than that? — the lilies being not our 
lilies of the valley, but the tall crimson flowers which 
round about Gennesareth still raise their heads like 
kings in splendour. 

But this distinctiveness appears still more in the 
choice of places for certain moods of mind. When the 
lonely struggle of the temptation had to be wrought 
out, He went into the wilderness. For communion 
with his Father, when He was weary of heart, He 
chose the hill-top in its silence beneath the stars ; for 
transfiguration, Hermon, when the glory of the setting 
sun poured a flood of gold into its valleys; for the 
agony, Gethsemane, with olives dark in the moon, and 
the rough patter of Kedron over its stony bed. Think 
of these things. They speak of acute sensibility in 
vital activity ; they give us an impression of delicate 
beauty of character. 

I have already spoken of this interest of Christ's in 
natural beauty as having a real practical bearing upon 
our life. But there is something more to say. In it, 
Christ is seen as the Master and source of natural 
religion. In his parables, in his wanderings over hill 
and plain, in the grove and by the lake, He gathers 



The Beauty of Christ's Character. 109 

tip and claims as Divine, all those dim regrets and 
vague ideals, those thoughts which lie too deep for 
tears, those moments of ecstacy with nature, when imagi- 
nation transfigures life ; all that world of poetry, music, 
and art, which the sense of natural beauty stirs in the 
heart of man, and creates by the hand of man. And 
in this He recognises as his own the natural religion 
of to-day, and bids us believe in its beauty and add it 
to the spiritual. 

Never, men say, was faith weaker than now : never 
they own, was the poetic recognition of the beauty and 
mystery of the world greater than now. I\Tever, cer- 
tainly, did the imaginative sense of the forms of ex- 
ternal nature more tell upon the moral temper of 
mankind than now. The study of art, the love of 
music, the mere sight of the grander scenery of the 
world, to see which we make an exodus every year, are 
moral agencies which are influencing lives around us, 
as really, and in many cases more widely, than the 
directly religious teaching we can give. There are 
those who condemn these things as leading men away 
from the spiritual world. They have forgotten the 
teaching of Christ. If all be true which we have now 
said, Christ felt these modern feelings, and led men to 
God through nature and its works. And it may be 
that in this modern tendency, the spirit of Christ is 
teaching now as of old ; that from the schools of 
theology and the pulpits of our synagogues He is 
leading forth the crowd into the fields and the wilder- 
ness and by the lake, that He may teach them there in 
parables to know and see the King in his beauty. 



1 10 The Beauty of Christ's Character. 

Secondly, if it be true that sensibility to natural im- 
pressions ceases to be a beautiful thing in a character, 
unless it become active through sympathy, it is still 
more plainly true of sensibility to human feeling. It 
is a beautiful thing to be sensible to noble conduct, to 
feel inspired by courage in another, to rejoice in truth 
when truth dies for righteousness' sake, to thrill with 
compassion for sorrow. But if these feelings never 
realise themselves in practical sympathy, we instinc- 
tively feel that they are only another form of sel- 
fishness, that men encourage them for the excitement 
they afford them, not for the good they urge them 
to do to others. They connect themselves in our 
mind with the slothfulness which refuses to put them 
into work, and the connection of selfishness and sloth 
with anything takes from it all vital beauty. 

It was not so with Christ. His extraordinary sen- 
sibility to human feeling became operative at once as 
sympathy, was at once translated into action. I need 
scarcely seek for examples of this. It is in all our 
remembrance how his tenderness stayed upon the way- 
side to satisfy the mother's neart and to bless the 
children ; how his compassion felt in itself the weari- 
ness of the multitude and gave it rest and food. We 
remember how swift was the love which, touched by 
the widow's weeping, stopped the bier and restored to 
his mother's arms the son; how strange that passion 
of tears at the grave of Lazarus, which wept because 
those He loved were weeping even at the moment 
when He was about to give back the lost ; how dis- 
criminating the sympathy which gave to Martha and 



The Beauty of Christ's Character. 1 1 1 

to Mary their several meed of praise ; how unspeakable 
in beauty that translation into words of the sorrow of 
the mother and the Apostle, which He felt within Him- 
self, and to both phases of which, in utter forgetful- 
ness of his own pain, He spoke distinctively: 'Woman, 
behold thy son ! ' Friend, e behold thy mother ! ' And 
how delicate and yet what a home-thrust to the shame 
and love of Peter, how actively creative in its effects 
upon the Apostle's character, was that threefold question, 
6 Lovest thou me ? 5 All was felt which human feeling 
felt, and then all was sympathised with actively, till at 
last, upon the cross, all the sorrows of the world were 
taken in to Himself and borne in the activity of 
voluntary suffering, that they might be for ever, in the 
end, lifted off the heart of mankind. It is there, when 
intense sensibility to the want, and woe, and sin of men 
had led Him to absolute self-sacrifice through sym- 
pathy — there, in that bowed head and broken Manhood 
— that we realise at last, in the radiance of love which 
eye hath not seen, the King in his perfect beauty. 

This, then, is loveliness of character for you and me. 
Remember, we have no right to boast of our sensibility 
to the feelings of others ; nay, it is hateful in us, till 
we lift it into the beauty of sympathising action. 

One word more upon this sympathy. It was given 
to all the world ; but it was not given in a like 
manner to all, nor at all times. There is a certain 
unpleasantness in undiscriminating sympathy, which 
possesses nothing special nor any moments of reserve. 
Such a character is without loveliness ; we find no 
mystery in it to charm and lure ; we have no sense of 



H2 The Beauty of Christ's Character. 

depths which, we should delight to penetrate; we know 
all, and having known all, pass on by an irresistible 
necessity, and leave that friend behind. He is super- 
ficial — in one word, he wants humanity. 

Plainly, the sympathy of Christ did not want this 
element of beauty. He had, in its fitting place, the 
Teutonic quality of reserve. He shrank from over- 
publicity; He kept his secret heart for those dearest 
to Him, though his love went over the world. He 
gave closer sympathy and affection to three among his 
disciples than to the others. He gave more tenderness 
to Mary than to Martha. Without any favouritism, 
He still, as a personal friend, individualised his affec- 
tion. He felt the necessity at times for even deeper 
reserve. When the multitude oppressed Him, He went 
away with his disciples to the desert ; when his disciples 
could not comfort Him, the lonely man went apart to 
speak only with his Father. There often hung round 
his actions and his teaching an indefiniteness, neces- 
sitated by the vast range of his thought, and by the 
profound way in which He felt the problems of life 
and spoke their explanation, which threw around Him, 
and still throws around Him to us, that beauty which 
lies in mystery, when it is a mystery which we know by 
experience is worth our further search. Still we feel 
that He has many things to say to us and to the world 
which we cannot bear now. Still He speaks to us in 
proverbs and in parables. Still the imagination, the 
feeling, and the intellect of man have an endless field 
of work in his character and his teaching. Still we are 
lured by the beauty of His life to discover in it new 
beauty. His character possesses the loveliness which 



The Beauty of Christ's Character. 113 

belongs to reserve, to distinctiveness of love, to the 
mystery which comes from depth of nature and infinity 
of thought. 

Therefore remember, that Christ has sanctified what 
is good in that quality we call reserve. Do not be too 
anxious to give away yourself, to wear your heart upon 
your sleeve. It is not only unwise, it is wrong to make 
your secret soul common property. For you bring the 
delicate things of the heart into contempt by exposing 
them to those who cannot understand them. If you 
throw pearls before swine, they will turn again and 
rend you. 

Nor, again, should you claim too much openness, as a 
duty due to you, from your child, your friend, your wife, 
or your husband. Much of the charm of life is ruined 
by exacting demands of confidence. Eespect the na- 
tural modesty of the soul; its more delicate flowers 
of feeling close their petals when they are touched too 
rudely. Wait with curious love — with eager interest 
— for the time when, all being harmonious, the revela- 
tion will come of its own accord, undemanded. The 
expectation has its charm, for as long as life has some- 
thing to learn, life is interesting ; as long as a friend 
has something to give, friendship is delightful. Those 
who wish to destroy all mystery in those they love, to 
have everything revealed, are unconsciously killing 
their own happiness. It is much to be with those who 
have many things to say to us which we cannot bear 
now. It is much to live with those who sometimes 
speak to us in parables — if we love them. Love needs 
some indefiniteness in order to keep its charm. Eespect, 



H4 The Beauty of Christ's Character, 



which saves love from the familiarity which degrades it, 
is kept vivid when we feel that there is a mystery in 
those we love which comes of depth of character. 

Remember that in violating your own reserve, or 
that of another, you destroy that sensitiveness of cha- 
racter which makes so mucli of the beauty of cha- 
racter; and beauty of character is not so common as 
not to make it a cruel thing to spoil it. 

Again, it is pleasant to think that Christ sanctified 
distinctiveness in friendship and love. No character 
can be beautiful, though it may be excellent, which 
can give the same amount of affection to all alike. It 
argues a want of delicacy, and, worse still, a want of 
individuality in the character, which at once negative 
its beauty. There are some who think that they should 
strive to bestow equal love on all, and who, on religious 
grounds, avoid particular friendships. It was not Christ's 
way, and it ends badly. They only succeed in spoiling 
their power of loving and power of sympathy. These 
are gained and strengthened by strongly felt and 
special love for a few. If you want to give love and 
sympathy to all, have profound love for particular 
persons ; for you cannot gain the power of loving 
otherwise than in a natural manner, and it is unnatural 
to love all alike. But love, easily going forth to those 
whom you find it easy to love, learns to grow deep 
and to double its power — and then spreads abroad like a 
stream which is most impetuous at its fountains. Christ 
did not love the world less, but more, because He had 
peculiar personal affections, and it is to that distinc- 
tiveness of love we turn when we would realise the 



The Beauty of Christ's Character. 115 

beauty of his love as distinguished from the majesty of 
his love. We are astonished when we think of the 
universality of his tenderness — but we have little 
comfort from it. Our soul longs for some personal 
contact with Him. Then it is that the speciality of 
his love for some comes home to us, and we know that 
He can give us a distinct sympathy fitted for our 
character. His love is universal, for all the race; it 
is particular, to each one of the race. Majesty of cha- 
racter meets in this with beauty of character. 

Finally, encourage in yourselves the sensibilities of 
life. No man is born quite without the power of 
receiving impressions from nature, and from human na- 
ture, though there are many who have brought death by 
neglect upon their native power. To encourage these 
sensibilities is not to fall into sentimental indulgence 
of feeling, for you can only encourage and increase 
them by active exercise of imagination and intellect ; 
by active expression of them in the support and comfort 
of men. It is those who take no real pains with their 
sensibilities, who fall into mere sentiment. 

Open your heart to receive the teaching of nature ; 
not too passively, lest you lose your individuality, but 
letting all your powers freely play upon the lessons 
she brings to you ; nor yet assuming too much activity 
of intellect upon what you receive from her, lest you 
lose the humility of receptiveness. 

Open your heart to receive the teaching which comes 
to you from human nature. Feeling received and 
feeling given back will educate you into a strange like- 
ness to Christ. You will learn, like Christ, to find your 



1 1 6 The Beauty of Christ's Character. 

religion in human life. Listen lowly to the simple 
common word which is very nigh to us ; for in the com- 
mon details, accidents, affections of life — in the common 
relations of man to man, and of man to animals — in 
daily joys, and daily sorrows, that word speaks of the 
love of God to us, and of our childlike love to Him. 
But, both nature and man speak to us now, as Jesus 
spoke, in parables. He who has lost his sensitive- 
ness cannot understand these parables. 



The Beauty of Christ's Character.. 



117 



THE BEAUTY OF CHRIST S CHARACTER. 
' Thine eyes shall see the King in his beauty.' — Isaiah xxxiii. 17. 

There are human lives which are poems, as there are 
lives . which are prose. Some have the stately epic 
character, and we watch the course of their purifica- 
tion through the events of a nation's birth, or the 
growth of a religious idea. Others are the centre of 
so much of the doing and suffering of men, and move 
towards their fate with so deep an influence on the 
development of others, that we may well compare 
them to the evolution of a drama. Others stand for 
the most part alone, in a musical unity of life, com- 
plete in themselves, and lovely with noble feeling. 
These are the lyrical souls in the world. 

There are other analogies, but let these suffice. 
They are the beautiful lives, lives which we may call 
artist work. Each has its own distinct charm ; they 
give pleasure as poetry gives it, by the expression of 
the beautiful. Such a life, at its very highest range, 
was the life of Christ. We seek its poetry to-day, and 
we weave our thoughts of it round that profound phrase 
of Milton's, that poetry must be c simple, sensuous, and 
passionate. 5 

Now if our comparison be true, the beautiful cha- 



1 1 8 The Beauty of Christ's Character. 

racter must also possess these qualities in its perfect 
development of reposefulness and activity. He must 
be simple, otherwise the world cannot be widely affected 
by his life and words. There are poets and teachers 
who speak only to a small class, touching on obscure 
or temporary phases of human thought. They die 
with the age which gave them birth. But the greater 
prophets speak the language of the common human 
heart, and yet have depths of feeling into which only 
a few can penetrate. For every superb genius is at 
once aristocrat and democrat. The common people 
hear him gladly, and yet to few it is given to know his 
mysteries. 

Again, he must be not only simple, but also sen- 
suous ; that is, intensely sensitive to impressions de- 
rived through the senses, and continually receiving them. 
For it is from the infinite variety of these impressions, 
and the ceaseless work of his imagination upon them, 
that his character derives the beauty of changeful- 
ness — changefulness, however, which is subject to an 
inner unity. The soul of such a man is beautiful, 
for out of the impulse of these impressions a multi- 
tude of feelings, each having almost imperceptible shades 
of difference, are born within him, so that he can allot 
to each thing its distinctive tone, and to each person 
a distinctive sympathy, till at last, his inner life be- 
comes like that wonderful world imagined by one of 
our poets : 

Where do inhabit 
The shadows of all forms which think and live. 

Dreams and the light imaginings of men, 
And all that faith creates and love desires* 



The Beauty of Christ's Character. 1 19 

And more than he imagined — the types of all natural 
forms and perfect landscapes, the visions which come 
to men upon the solitary hills ; the things which haunt 
' thought's wildernesses ; ' the air-born, filmy children 
of the senses when married to imagination. 

Passionate also he must be, for all this received 
beauty and feeling remain unshared and unexpressed 
unless they be so passionately felt as to ensure expres- 
sion. There is beauty in the character which feels 
with passion but cannot speak. The pure beauty of 
feeling passes into the face ; there are subtile motions 
of eyelid and lip which are more than many poems ; 
there are acts in which whole books, whole lives, are 
concentrated. It is passion in silent expression, and 
within its sphere the range and forms of beauty are 
immeasurable, from the almost imperceptible change 
within the smile which records a flying cloud of 
transient joy or pain, to the voiceless death in which a 
great man's sacrifice ennobles and redeems a nation. 

But when the power of speech accompanies the ex- 
pression of action, when he who acts passionately can 
also strike into words the meaning of his passion and 
the spirit of his act, and send it down for ever to 
thrill and inspire mankind ; then, if the passion which 
move him be divinely human and naturally pure, the 
crown of the beauty of genius has been reached. 

When we talk of passionate poetry we mean too 
often that which speaks only of the passion of love. 
This is not what Milton meant by his word. He meant 
that the poetry was so intense on every subject it 
treated, that one knew instinctively, as one read, that 



120 The Beauty of Christ's Character. 

the poet had lost in his enthusiasm of expression all 
thought of self. Poetry intense on one subject and 
not on all, was inferior work ; it was liable to become 
overstrained on that one subject, and in doing so it 
lost the note of beauty. This has been more or less 
the case with many of our so-called passionate poets. 
It provokes a smile that Byron — who, with all his 
colossal power, was always looking round to see how 
the world was affected by his poetry, and whose painful 
personality is intruded into his most vivid descriptions 
of love and nature — should be called the poet of passion, 
and Wordsworth the poet of calm. Wordsworth did not 
write much of the passion of false love, nor of the 
passion of true love between youth and maiden; but 
no passion is at a whiter heat than his when he writes 
of a mother's love to a child, or of a husband to a wife, 
and we never hear an unmanly note of self-consciousness. 
And when his soul was stirred with the greater passions 
of humanity — love of liberty, sympathy with a great 
nation passing through a storm of revolution, deep 
sorrow for the fall of a people from a glorious past, the 
aspiration of the heart of mankind to the Infinite, 
the majesty of knowledge and the eternity of his own 
art — he rises to a height of majestic passion, his words 
have the stately step of gods — they burn like the 
bush on Sinai, white, but unconsumed. 

Still greater was his passion when he lost himself in 
nature. Only one other English poet surpassed him in 
this, and he, in surpassing him, drifted into a frequent 
extravagance, which leads us back to Wordsworth in 
the end, as the king of those who have grasped nature 



The Beauty of Christ's Character. 1 2 1 

closely and expressed her life intensely. For lie had 
sobriety in the centre of passion. His sense of fitness, 
his sense of simplicity, his sense of temperance as the 
cestus of beauty, ruled his most passionate moods with 
nature. 

Nor did his temperance make his passion less, but 
more. It prevented it from losing itself in too rapid 
a flame. It intensified it by pressure, while it held 
its unused force so sternly under command that it 
could be directed at once with full power upon any 
point of a subject, and modified so as to give the just 
amount of power to each point. 

By this calmness in the midst of passion, the highest 
beauty of art is reached, and the greatest and noblest 
pleasure given. 

Now these which are the qualities of beautiful poetry 
are the qualities also of the beautiful character, and 
belong to human nature in its idea]. They ought, 
therefore, to have belonged to Him in whom we believe 
that human nature reached not only its highest majesty 
but its highest beauty. 

Take, then, the first — simplicity. It is not of the 
simplicity of Christ's teaching that I speak, for to that 
I have alluded already, but of the quality in his cha- 
racter which corresponds to that which we call sim- 
plicity in poetry. That which is simplicity in art is 
purity in a perfect character. 

Now the beauty of Christ's purity was first in this, 
that those who saw it, saw in it the glory of moral 
victory. 

We talk of the beauty of innocence in a child. That 



122 The Beauty of Christ's Character. 

was not the beauty of Christ's purity. Exquisite as 
it is, we know that it is fleeting, and the sense of its 
transiency stains our pleasure. Some speak of the 
spiritual beauty which belongs to the untempted life of 
one who has never known the world, which shines upon 
the faces of those saints whom Angelico conceived in 
his cloistered solitude. Neither was that the beauty of 
Christ's purity. 

The purity of Christ was purity which had been 
subject to the storm, which had known evil and over- 
come it, which had passed through the dusty ways of 
men, and received no speck upon its white robes. A 
tempest of trial had only driven it, like the snow on 
Alpine summits, into more dazzling spotlessness. It 
was beautiful with its own beauty ; it was still more 
beautiful, in that it stirred in men the sensation of 
moral power, of sustained activity of soul. 

And from this purity, so tried and so victorious, 
arose two other elements of moral beauty, perfect 
justice and perfect mercy. Innocence cannot be just. 
It does not know good, it does not know evil : how 
can it judge without knowledge ? It would fling reward 
or punishment to those brought before it, without know- 
ing whether the reward would be reward, or the punish- 
ment punishment, to the persons on whom they were 
bestowed. It could never apportion mercy, or apportion 
justice, to different degrees of penitence or sin. There 
is nothing uglier than recklessness, and recklessness is 
the characteristic of the judgments of innocence. 

Nor is the untempted saint fit to judge. He does not 
know the force of temptation. He is severe and cruel 



The Beauty of 'Christ s Character. 123 

when he seeks to be just ; he can make no allowances ; 
his mercy he calls weakness ; he insists on too much 
penitence, more than the sinner can bear 5 he drives, 
by the very force of rigid goodness, men into despair. 

But Christ is able to be just and yet merciful, because 
He is entirely pure. Having known evil and subdued it, 
He judges from perfect knowledge. He suffered, being 
tempted, therefore He is merciful, knowing the force 
of temptation ; He met and realised in battle the root 
principles of evil, therefore his justice is stern and 
unrelenting when He sees these principles ruling the 
jives of men. So it was that He had no words of pity 
for the hypocrite, the root of whose life was falsehood : 
the only thing which could save the Pharisee was 
unrelenting condemnation. So it was that He had 
mercy on the publican whose heart He saw to be broken 
with penitence, and on the woman who had been over- 
taken in a fault. In all the acts of the Saviour there 
is no act and no words so beautiful — beautiful for their 
daring, for their magnificent trust in human nature, 
for their magnificent independence of the opinion of 
men, for their perfect marriage of justice and mercy — 
as the act and the words of Christ to the woman 'taken 
in adultery : 6 Woman, hath no man condemned thee ?' 
6 No man, Lord.' f Neither do I condemn thee : go, and 
sin no more.' It was the judgment of perfect purity. 

This was not, as some have put it, a divine incapacity 
for seeing evil ; it was a divine capacity for seeing good 
through evil. ' Blessed are the pure in heart, for they 
shall see God ' — not only God as He is in His perfect 
being, not only God in nature, but also Gcd in man. 



124 The Beazcty of 'Christ 's Character. 

It was this power which Christ possessed as the result 
of purity. Wherever there was a shred of good, a 
spark of the Divine in the lost and sinful, Christ sav* 
it by the instinct of his purity. He discovered it and 
drew it forth, as a magnet would draw from a heap of 
chaff one needle-point of steel. There is no loveliness 
in a character greater than this, and it stamps the 
whole of the Saviour's life. If you would win it, be 
pure in heart. 

(2.) The second element of beauty in art was sen- 
suousiiess. That word in Milton's sense of it was 
entirely noble in meaning. Of its representative in a 
character I liave already spoken in speaking of the 
sensibility of the character of the Saviour to impres- 
sions received from nature and from man. But I may 
add this, that as the poet produces beautiful work out 
of the multitudinous world of images of things and 
feelings which he has received, so the exquisiteness of 
the parables and of the words of Christ, both in form 
and expression, was the direct result of the knowledge 
He had gained from this quality of sensibility. A 
world of natural images dwelt within Him ; a world of 
varied human feelings, received from all the men and 
women whom He had met, dwelt within Him also. 
The parables unite these two worlds in expression. 
They make nature reflect man, and man receive from 
nature. They make all the doings of nature explain 
the life of man; they teach the life of man to find 
teaching and comfort in the life of nature. They have 
even a deeper thought than this — they make us feel 
that God Himself has harmonised us to our habitation ; 



The Beaitty of Chris f s Character. 125 

that the mind of man is fitted to the external world, 
and the external world to the mind 5 and that through 
the wedlock of the intellect and the spirit of man, in love 
and holy passion,* to the universe, as well as through 
reverence to Him who established this harmony between 
us and nature, we reach, whether in science or in art, 
our noblest intellectual height ; and in religion, so far 
as natural religion is concerned, our noblest spiritual 
life. 

He who walks this world, conscious of that inner 
harmony between himself and the universe of which 
the parables are the expression, walks in the midst of 
an atmosphere of beauty. c The living presence of the 
earth 5 waits upon his steps, and her presence is of 
divine loveliness, for it is the form of God's idea. 
Everything speaks to him. He sees himself in all he 
sees ; but it is himself as he ought to be, and the vi- 
sion is inspiring, not degrading. The common air 
he breathes, the sunshine and the rain, the growth of 
plants, the sea which shimmers and the clouds which 
move in light, speak parables to him, of which God as 
a Father and Man as a child are the interpretation; 
they tell him that in common life he may find his first, 
perhaps his best religion ; that 

The primal duties shine aloft — like stars ; 
The charities which soothe, and heal, and bless, 
Are scattered at the feet of men like flowers. 

To him who has this secret law of harmony, the 
universe imparts 6 authentic tidings of invisible things,' 



* See Preface to the Excursion. 



126 The Beauty of Christ's Character. 

the beauty of harmonious variety, the beauty of eternal 
power, the beauty of activity held in the calm of order. 
He lives in this beauty, and he grows beautiful by 
communion with it ; he lives in the region of the para- 
bles of Christ. 

(3.) The third element of great poetry is passion. 
We may transfer it directly to a character as an 
element of beauty. It is best denned as the power of 
intense feeling capable of perfect expression. It is 
the source of the beauty of energy and in temperance 
is its lasting charm. 

It was intense feeling of the weakness and sin 
of man, and intense joy in his Father's power to re- 
deem, which produced the story of the £ Prodigal Son,' 
where every word is on fire with tender passion. See 
how it comes home, even now, to men ; see how its 
profound humanity has made it universal ! 

6 Come unto me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, 
and I will give you rest.' How that goes home to the 
deepest want of the race ; how deep the passion which 
generalised that want into a single sentence; how 
intense, yet how pathetic — pathetic because intense — 
the expression of it ; how noble the temperance which 
stayed at the single sentence and felt that it was 
enough. 

And if you seek for the silent passion of action, we 
find it in many forms in his life. They speak of 
intensity of feeling at once realising itself — from the 
driven flight into the wilderness to the vital rush of 
his inward glory into the transfigured expression of 
his form upon the side of Hermon ; from the moment 



The Beauty of Christ's Character. 127 

» 

when He stood on the great stairs of the Temple, crying, 
' If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink/ 
to the hour when He wept over the guilt and ruin of 
his nation; from the awfulness of the supreme agony 
in the garden to the last cry of triumph for a world 
redeemed which rose out of the abyss of death upon 
the cross. In all it was passion in its noblest forms 
and in the intensest expression. It is a beauty of 
character which passes into and assumes the diadem 
of sublimity. 

All this gives the impression of a nature inspired by 
a stream of ever-flowing energy — of a nature all whose 
powers were in vital action. It is this easy, natural 
activity, this instantaneousness in the marriage of the 
thought to the act, which is another element of beauty, 
for it suggests, not only passion, but the harmony of 
passions and absolute healthiness of soul. In the 
midst of a world which gives a false glory to violent 
passion- and likes to dwell on morbid passion in its 
literature, it is delightful to turn to the perfectly active 
yet perfectly healthy soul of Christ ; its intensity of 
feeling subdued to do his work, so that He could both 
act and speak to the point at once. 

Again and again in the gospel story we are made to 
feel this promptitude and keenness of Christ. 

The right thing is always done at the right time, 
not a moment too late or too early. We are conscious 
of the fire of enthusiasm, but we never find hurry ; 
there is no divergence from the plan of life under un- 
regulated impulse ; the act is never overstrained. 

The right thing also is said at the right time, and 



128 The Beauty of Christ's Character. 

said with exquisite knowledge of the less or more which 
might have spoiled its influence. There is no irritating 
repetition of reproof ; ong sharp stern phrase is spoken 
and no more : 6 Get thee behind me, adversary ; 5 6 Ye 
know not what spirit ye are of — and then silence. 

The same may be said of his praise. There is no 
flattery ; the central point worthy of praise in the cha- 
racter, often a quite unexpected point, is seized on at 
once and brought into prominence. 5 Behold an Israel- 
ite indeed, in whom is no guile ; 5 c I have not found so 
great faith, no, not in Israel ; 5 4 She loved much ; ' — in 
all, the one clear sentence which revealed the man to 
himself, and which will remain, because of its absolute 
fitness, as his central attribute in our memory. 

This is the beauty of energy, the child of passion, in 
a nature perfectly at harmony through the exercise of 
temperance. 

But Christ has been accused of intemperance, espe- 
cially in his severe treatment of the Pharisees. * If this 
be true, perfect beauty of character is gone, for tem- 
perance, inasmuch as it keeps all the powers of the 
soul from extravagance, c is the girdle of beauty.' But 
I have never been impressed with the justice of this 
objection. I can conceive nothing more worthy of 
indignation than Pharisaism. In all its forms it is hate- 
ful; and not only Christ, but every teacher, Pagan 
or Christian, in proportion as he loved truth, mercy, 
and righteousness, has denounced it as the worst of 
evils. The more true, and pure, and human a man 
was, the more indignation would he feel against it, 
and it was because Christ was truer, purer, and more 



The Beauty of Christ 1 s Character. 129 

human than others, that He spoke more strongly than 
others. 

But were his expressions used in anger, rather than 
in indignation ? If so, however deserved, they were 
intemperate. They do not wear that aspect. In 
anger, reason has not time to operate; words rush 
almost unwittingly to the lips. Hence, they are inco- 
herent ; they are unjust ; they want the mark of deli- 
berate choice ; they run on in unmeaning declama- 
tion; they do not hit the point, they do not sting. 
But indignation, being a noble and divine quality, is 
led by reason and is the servant of justice. It waits 
before it speaks. Its denunciation is calm, deliberate, 
and full ; the words are chosen so as to hit the point 
and the evil hard, and in the centre ; they are weighed 
so as to be scrupulously just. They bear the stamp 
of thought, and they do their work, making the heart 
on which they fall writhe with shame and pain. A* 
certain amount of fine irony often goes with this in- 
dignation, for there is calm at its root, and irony is the 
child, in such matters, of indignation and calm. 

ISTow, Christ's words to the Pharisees have all the 
marks of indignation and none of the marks of anger. 
I cannot conceive beauty of character without indigna- 
tion at evil. Purity implies it, and indignation, by its 
very essence, is restrained to strict justice, laying on its 
scourge exactly with the requisite severity and in the re- 
quisite place. There was passion in the words of Christ, 
but it was divine passion, under the restraint of law. 
It did not sin against temperance ; nay, it derived its 
force from temperance. 



1 30 The Beauty of Christ's Character. 

Lastly, passion and energy, limited by temperance, 
imply repose of character. As we cannot attribute re- 
pose to that which has not the capability of energy, 
so that energy is not noble energy, nor is it directed 
by temperance in the midst of its passion, unless it 
be capable of profound calm. I will even go further, 
and say that all noble moral energy roots itself in moral 
calm. Now, as in all art, so also in all human character, 
we demand, as in one the appearance, so also in the 
other the reality of repose, as a primary element of 
beauty. All restlessness — a very different thing from 
vital energy — is ugly, having no goal, being full of 
vain effort. Activity in repose, calm in the heart of 
passion, these things are of the essence of beauty. 

And in Him in whom we have found the King in his 
beauty this peacefulness was profound. His activity 
grew out of his deep quietude of trust in his Father's 
'will. It mattered little to Him that the turbulence 
of parties surrounded Him and the wild mob of Jeru- 
salem cried for his death. He passed on in the calm 
of one to whom duty was all, to finish the work 
given Him to do ; content quietly to live or quietly to 
die, unalarmed, and unimpatient, for his Father's law 
was his law, and his life and death were hidden in the 
stillness of God's will ; consistent in self-rule, because He 
had escaped from self into union with the perfect good ; 
satisfied to suffer, for He reposed upon the promise and 
believed in the love of his Father. This is the final touch 
of beauty, which gathers into itself, and harmonises, 
all the others ; and hence no words are so beautiful as 
those in which, having perfect rest Himself, He bestows 



The Beauty of Christ's Character. 131 

it as his dying legacy on men : ' Peace I leave with you, 
peace I give unto you 5 not as the world giveth give I 
unto you ; ' and repeats it as his resurrection gift : 
6 Peace be unto you.' 

Let us part with this supreme conception in our 
hearts. In the midst of the fevered activity and unre- 
strained passion of our life in this great city, seek for 
a centre of calm. Pind it where Christ found it, in 
humble trust in a Father's love ; rind it in the calm 
which comes of duty accepted as the law of life, duty 
to your heavenly Pather, duty to your brother-men. 
Pind it in resolute obedience 5 so that the spirit of that 
solemn inscription over the dead at Thermopylae may be 
true of you : 6 Stranger, tell the Lacedaemonians that 
we lie here in obedience to their orders.' Pind it by 
realising in yourself, through union with Christ's spirit 
and Christ's life, that deep calm of his which translated 
noble passions into noble energy, and moved his energy 
forwards within the temperate sphere of law. So will 
you see and reflect in character the King in his beauty. 
Por all moral loveliness, and all spiritual, lies in know- 
ing what He meant when He said : 6 Come unto me, 
all ye that labour, and are heavy laden, and I will give 
you rest.' 



132 



Prayer and Natural Law. 



PRAYER AND NATURAL LAW. 

* Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume 
it upon your lusts.' — James iv. 3. 

Pbayek, is in its plainest meaning a petition addressed 
to God. We desire Him to give us some blessing, to 
help us in some difficulty, or to relieve us from some 
pain. But this meaning, when brought face to face 
with the conception of the absolute, or to the test of 
modern scientific knowledge, is open to a series of 
objections. To escape from these objections other 
meanings have been given to prayer. It has been 
said, that to labour is to pray : it has been said that 
to have communion with God, and to meditate on 
Him, is to pray : it has been said, that aspiration is 
prayer. But however true these definitions may be, 
they are not, even taking them all together, an ade- 
quate definition, as long as they omit or place in the 
background the idea of petition. ]STor do we avoid 
the metaphysical and scientific difficulties when we 
ignore petition as being of the essence of prayer. It is 
and will always remain its greatest part. 

It is wiser, then, if we would retain prayer as an 
intellectual conception and not discredit it to our- 
selves in the spiritual world, to look its difficulties in 



Prayer and Natural Law, 



133 



the face. What are these ? Those which beset it in 
the spiritual and moral worlds arise from our idea of 
the unchangeability of God. In theology and meta- 
physics the further one gets from an idolatrous and 
superstitious idea of God, the more one conceives of 
Him as unable to alter His principles of action with- 
out changing His own nature. Suppose for a moment 
such a change in God, and the whole spiritual world 
would fall to pieces ; nay, more, He would then — and 
the phrase is not irreverent for it is founded on His 
own self-revelation — destroy Himself. 

The difficulties which beset prayer as petition, in 
connection with God as the Lord of the spiritual and 
moral world, have been discussed from generation to 
generation, and on the whole have been fairly answered. 
I leave these, then, behind, and take up the other side of 
the problem, for at present a new set of difficulties lie 
in our path, and occupy public interest. Prayer has 
come into contact with scientific discovery, and I ex- 
press the problem in theological terms when I say that 
the unchangeability of God as Lord of the physical 
world is expressed in modern science by the law of 
the conservation of force, and that that law denies the 
power of prayer to alter any natural sequence. 

The law itself is our statement of the fact that all 
the forces of the universe — light, heat and electricity, 
mechanical and chemical force, and the rest — are con- 
vertible into one another, and that the whole sum of 
them is a constant quantity. Force changes its form, 
but it is always the same, neither more nor less. No 
addition can be made to it, nothing can be taken 



1 34 Prayer and Natural Law. 

away from it. It can be infinitely converted, it cannot 
— unless we suppose the intervention of a miracl^ — be 
created. Every change in nature is then a matter of 
necessity. 'Every change ; — that is the point which so 
many seem altogether unable to realise. There are 
certain changes which no one would dream of asking 
God to make. No one would be likely to pray that 
for the sake of relieving our pauper population by 
additional land, all the lakes in the country should 
be suddenly dried up ; or that there should be two 
harvests in one year during a famine. This, men 
would say, would be miraculous, and we have no right 
to demand miracles of God. But, if the doctrine of 
the conservation of force be true, when we pray for the 
fall of a single shower of five minutes in length, or the 
change of the direction of the wind by a single point, 
or the evaporation of the faintest waft of cloud, by the 
independent will of God, we are asking for a miracle, 
and for as real and tremendous a disturbance of 
natural law as if we had asked the postponement of 
the rising of the sun, or the sudden removal of the 
moon from the sky. There is nothing little, or no- 
thing great, in the motions of the universe. The de- 
mand for the creation of the smallest conceivable wave 
of new force, is as serious a demand as that for the 
creation of force equivalent to that which builds up a 
volcano in a night. In one case and the other we 
pray for a miracle, and for miracles equal in import- 
ance. 

Now apply this to prayers for rain, and the like. A 
plague of rain, as it is called, falls upon England. We 



Prayer and Natura I L aw. 135 



offer up a prayer for its removal. It is worth while to 
ask ourselves what we are demanding. 

The antecedents which produced a month's rain here 
took place some time ago in the equatorial and polar 
regions. The vapours taken up by the heat in the 
south equatorial regions were swept northwards by the 
upper current which descends bearing the waters in its 
bosom to become a surface current in the temperate 
zone. But in descending it meets the surface polar 
current which is now rising to become an upper 
current. The cold current condenses the vapour in 
the warm current, and rain falls. Now the amount of 
rain depends on the amount of water taken up as 
vapour in the seas south of the equator, and on the 
amount of condensing cold sent southwards from the 
• polar seas ; and the amount of heat which raised the 
vapour, and of cold which made it fall in rain depended 
on conditions which took place the year before, and 
those on conditions which took place the year before 
that, and so on backwards as far as thought can reach. 
The amount of rain which fell last week in England is 
to the millionth of an inch the exact result of a series 
of antecedents which not only took place some time 
ago about the equator and the pole, but which go back to 
the very beginning* of things. 

When we pray, then, that God would cause the rain 
to cease, we are asking one of "two things — either that 
He would work a miracle for us, or, if we abjure that 
wish, that He would change, not circumstances as they 
exist at present, but all the natural phenomena which 
have existed on the globe, which is manifestlv absurd. 



♦ 



136 Prayer and Natu ral La w. 



When I think of these things, I find it absolutely 
impossible, without the grossest violation of my reason, 
to pray for or against rain, with a belief that God 
will answer my prayer. But you will say that God 
could do it if He liked. I do not say ISTo to that, 
but I have no hesitation in saying, that I should not 
dare to ask Him to change the order of the universe 
at my desire. Once a man is acquainted with the 
processes of nature, and realises what the conservation 
of force means, and the results which would follow on 
the creation of the smallest possible amount of new 
force — results, the end of which he could never see, 
which little here might be stupendous elsewhere (for 
the fall of a miraculous shower here might necessitate 
an earthquake elsewhere and destroy 20,000 souls) — 
he would not dare to pray for five minutes' rain which 
was not naturally coming. And if he believed that 
God would grant his prayer, would he dare, ought he to 
dare, to meet the tremendous responsibilities involved ? 
I could not ask God to create new force, even if I be- 
lieved He would do so. 

But there is another and more plausible objection to 
this rigid view that no sequence is or can be changed. 

It may be urged, that as human will can modify 
the future results of things occurring now by changing 
the conditions under which those results will deveiope 
themselves — as, for example, I could change the future 
climate of a country by cutting down its forest — so it may 
be a spiritual law that the human will, acting on God's 
will through His appointed channel prayer, may cause 
God to interpose conditions which will change the mode 



Prayer and Natural Law. 



137 



in which existing results are taking place. Bat the two 
members of the comparison are not equivalent. The 
modification of climate by man is the result of natural 
forces naturally used, through, a period of many years. 
The modification of existing climatal phenomena — the 
heat which, now prevails, for example — would be the 
result of a sudden interposition ; it would not be natural 
but prseternatural — it would be a miracle. 

But it may be again replied : God could do it within* 
the sphere of His own laws. He could introduce a 
higher law, or rearrange existing laws in a new com- 
bination, and so modify the fall of rain or banish, the 
pestilence, and doing so without a violation of law, it 
would not be a miracle. 

I answer, that the only true statement of a miracle 
which can be received, is that it is the result of a pre- 
arrangement by which the ordinary course of nature 
changes step, as it were, for a moment, by the ■ will 
of God, for some great spiritual result. A miracle 
conceived of as a violation of order is an absolute im- 
possibility. The alteration, therefore, of the course of 
the weather by God's rearrangement into a new com- 
bination of existing phenomena, is a miracle with this 
exception, that it is not accredited to the conscience of 
mankind by having as its end a gre.at and obvious 
spiritual result. 

In whatever way we look at the question, then, we 
pray for a miracle when we pray for the slightest change 
in the normal state of the universe. 

Are such unknown miracles now continually per- 
formed at the call of individual men who do not see 
7 



133 Prayer and NatiL ral Law. 



beyond the present ? Those who still believe that the 
miraculous is common in nature may pray with perfect 
consistency for rain, or fair weather, but they ought 
clearly to understand that they are asking God to per- 
form miracles. 

But those who cannot believe this, those who hold 
that a miracle is derogatory to the true idea of God, 
unless it is performed for great and ascertainable 
. spiritual ends — ends which appeal to our reason and 
excuse the miracle — cannot pray for rain, or for fair 
weather, or for the sudden removal of a pestilence, 
without idolatry. 

I do not say, I need scarcely assert this, that God 
could not perform continuous miracles at the instance 
of prayer, for I believe in a Personal Will which 
directs the universe towards an ultimate ^ood ; but 
I do say that it is to the last degree improbable that 
He would do so, and that if He did do so, we could 
have no security. Natural laws would be then at 
the mercy of every religious man. Some extremely 
good and spiritual persons are very imprudent in the 
practical work of the world. If their prayer about 
rain, fine weather, thunderstorms, pestilence, and other 
things is answered, and answered in accordance with a 
spiritual law, so that, in fact, by the hypothesis, it must 
be answered, what a state of utter confusion we should 
be in ! We could not be certain of the sun rising at the 
proper time ; we could not carry out with confidence 
any course of action founded on the assumption of the 
constancy of natural law. 

I do not deny miracles. On the contrary, by deny- 



Prayer and Natu ra I L aw. 139 

ing the existence of continuous miraculous action, the 
cause of miracles is saved from utter overthrow. I 
maintain, given the idea of a personal king of nature, 
and men, that it is not only conceivable, but to be 
expected, that at certain great crises of human history 
miracles should take place, with the purpose of initiating 
a new spiritual era and for the salvation of the race of 
men, to redeem whom the sacrifice of the whole order 
of the material universe were a price as small as one 
human soul is inconceivably more valuable than the 
whole realm of that which we call matter. 

But to spread these miracles over the whole of our 
human history is not only to destroy the very idea of a 
miracle, but to render the past miracles objects of 
the gravest doubt, by making the present supposed 
miracles absurd. I do not therefore believe that God 
interferes in any extraordinary manner with the usual 
course of nature. I do not believe that prayer does 
either bring or restrain rain : I do not think that it 
can check the cholera or divert the lightning. At the 
same time I believe that God could stay the rain and 
dismiss the pestilence, if it were His will, at the voice 
of prayer. He may do so for all I know, but it would 
make me miserable to think that ifc were so. 

Directly, then, we ought not to pray for interference 
with the course of nature. But now another question 
comes in. Is it impossible to influence the harvest, 
or to avert a pestilence indirectly through prayer ? Has 
prayer a legitimate field of influence in connection with 
physical occurrences? I think it has, and in this 
way. God is the source of all thought in the brain and 



140 Prayer arid Natural Law. 

of all true intuitions in imagination and spirit, as He 
is tlie source of all force in nature. He has made, we 
know, the force of nature a constant quantity. We are 
nowhere told that He has made the force of thought 
or the power of imagination constant. We are told 
that He -is constantly giving grace to the spirit ; we infer 
that He is constantly pouring upon men new thought 
and new power. Grace is given at the call of prayer ; we 
may infer that, certain conditions being fulfilled, ideas 
are suggested by Him also to the brain, and noble 
thoughts to the heart, and energy bestowed upon the 
will. It is a mistake to suppose that His inspiring 
power has ceased to work, or that it is confined to 
spiritual things. It is by His inspiration that the 
artist paints, that the politician thinks aright for the 
country, that the poet creates, that the philosopher 
conjectures and then proves the laws of the universe. 
The influence of God's spirit upon man's spirit is in- 
finite. The influence of God's thought upon man's 
thought I believe also to be unbounded. It is in this 
realm that prayer is of avail. Suppose that long- con- 
tinued rain threatens England with a bad harvest. We 
ought not to pray that the rain should cease, but we 
may pray that God would give intelligence and activity 
to farmers that they may make the best of their op- 
portunities ; we may ask God to inspire the scientific 
chemists to invent such new modes of agriculture as 
will reduce the evils of heavy rain to the least possible 
quantity ; or we might have prayed in times of Protec- 
tion that God would inspire with tenfold force and 
energy the leaders of the Anti-Corn Law League. We 



Prayer and Natural Law. 1 4 1 

may pray, in short, either that men may change their 
relation to unchanging law, or that they may be led to 
pass measures, or to act in accordance with the laws of 
the universe, so as to range themselves, not against, 
but on the side of law. And I have no doubt that such 
prayer is as powerful as it is legitimate, and that God 
will answer it. 

Take, again, the case of pestilence. It is asking 
amiss to pray that God will take it away from us 
suddenly, arbitrarily. As long as the causes which 
produce and aggravate it are in existence here, it must 
come, and all the prayers in the world will not keep it 
off. ISTay, it would be infinitely the worse for us, if 
our prayers succeeded in keeping it away. 

But to pray that God would inspire men of intelli- 
gence with keenness of observation and steadiness of 
investigation in order that they may discover the 
causes which awake and stimulate the pestilence ; that 
He may inspire men of science with those happy 
thoughts which, like Jenner's, all but put an end to a 
disease; that He may stir a nation up to vigorous 
measures to destroy those conditions which give viru- 
lence to a pestilence ; this is a legitimate field for a 
prayer which asks for that which it believes it will re- 
ceive. Such prayers have force, such prayers do modify, 
not directly, but indirectly through the effort of man, 
the course of the universe. 

We know that God does not interfere with the order 
of the universe ; we all but know that He does con- 
tinually interfere with the thoughtful and spiritual 
life of man : and the interference in the latter case 



142 Prayer and Natural Law. 

seems to us as natural, as lawful, and as probable as 
the interference in the former would seem to us preter- 
natural, lawless, and improbable. For what are we 
praying for? We are not praying against law, we are 
not dashing our heads against the dead wall of the 
nniverse ; we are not bringing our prayers into direct 
opposition with all that science teaches us. We are, 
on the contrary, praying that the Father of lights, 
the God of all knowledge, may enable us to understand 
His laws better, may kindle our intelligence so that we 
may go with, not against, the current of the motions of 
the universe; may bring the impulse of our heart in 
prayer into accordance with that revelation of Himself 
in nature, the high-priests of which are the men of 
science. We are praying that, knowing law, we may be 
able by our knowledge to lessen evil. I do not think 
that there is any natural philosopher who would say 
that this use of prayer was a sin against the law of the 
conservation of force 

In conclusion, ought we to do away with, ruthlessly, 
all prayer which asks of God to relieve us of physical 
misfortune ? Ought we to refrain from praying for 
fine weather when one we love dearly is at sea, or to 
check the petition on the lips when those who make 
our being rich are exposed to pestilence ? That would 
seem too hard for the human heart in its moment of 
agony and suspense ; and the paradox is that even 
when we have no hope, even when we know that God 
will not change His laws, we ask Him to do so for us. 
There is a natural rush of the heart into petition which 
it would be spiritual suicide to check. 



Prayer and Natural Law. 1 43 

Listen to a parable. A certain ruler had two servants, 
and said unto them, 'Labour every day in the fields 
from morn till eventide, or be imprisoned for a time.' 
Now it came to pass upon a certain day when the sun 
was hot, that both the servants fell asleep and woke 
only as evening fell. They heard their master coming 
in and were called to come before him : and the first 
came in and said, e Master, no prayers can move thee,' 
and in angry silence took his sentence : and the other 
heard, and knew his master to be faithful to his lawj 
but because he loved him he could not be silent, but 
ran and fell at his master's feet and prayed, saying, 
6 Eelease me of the prison.' And his master smiled on 
him, and said, ( I cannot ; take him away.' And he arose 
and went,, but as he went his heart was lightened, and 
he said to himself, 6 The pain at my heart is gone, for 
I have spoken, and my master has smiled on me.' And 
he thought of his master's inexorable order, and as he 
thought, it grew beautiful in his eyes, even while he 
suffered in the prison. But his fellow -labourer was 
more angry every day with his master, and the prison 
grew darker as he chafed against a law which would 
not forfeit punishment. 

So is prayer, when the inexorable laws of the universe 
threaten your life or the life of one you love. Make 
no use of it, and your heart breaks from the passion of 
hidden grief, or grows bitter from the change of grief 
into anger. But use it, pour out your wild petition at 
your Father's feet, even though you know it is useless, 
and the expression gives relief. The perilous stuff is 
lifted off, and you are able to bear the new pain with the 



i 4 4 



Prayer and Natural Law. 



old courage. You have cast your care upon a Father, and 
though He does not stay the blow, He smiles upon you, 
and the prison of your sorrow is made bright with the 
thought of His love. A strange conviction of security 
comes upon your life. c He will not err from order,' you 
say, ' even to relieve me of my pain ; I can therefore 
trust Him as I could not trust Him if I thought my 
weak and ignorant will could bend His all-wise will, 
directed by His love. His love ! — yes, I feel that His 
love would not be worth having, could not be trusted 
were it not one with unchangeably.' In this way, 
we learn slowly to grow into harmony with His will, to 
submit to it with contentment mingled with the pain 
we suffer, to say to ourselves, ' Better that His perfect 
will should guide me, than that I should be the victim 
of my own imperfect will. 5 The result ojf that is peace. 
Therefore, pray, for it relieves you by expression — it 
brings God's fatherhood and all its infinite comfort 
home to the heart ; "it leads to the peace which comes 
of recognising that you are in the hands of unchangeable 
affection directed by unchangeable Eight. 

Lastly. Prayer at such moments produces change of 
mind in you towards the suffering you endure. The 
prison seemed terrible to the servant, but when he got 
there, it was not what he expected. His prayer and the 
smile he had won had altered the relation of his feel- 
ing towards the punishment, and alteration of character 
changes things, not in themselves, but to us. A man 
is perishing, I will suppose, in a tempest. His wildest 
prayer, he knows, cannot save him or his wife, folded 
in his last embrace. But natural feeling will have ita 

i 



Prayer and Natural Law. 1 45 



way, and tlie prayer, Save us, our God, rushes to his 
lips. They are not saved, the sea drinks up their life 
— but it is no dream, but told by many a survivor, that 
in the ghastliest wreck there have been those over whose 
faces after prayer there has stolen an expression of un- 
utterable peace and joy. Words have been spoken, 
which said that death had become beautiful, that spirits 
brought into harmony by prayer with the will of a Father, 
and beholding the smile upon His face, had seen, by a 
wondrous triumph over all that is terrible to man, in the 
raging sea and the terror of the midnight hurricane, only 
the vision of perfect love, and died as men die in happy 
sleep. In this way the necessary expression of impas- 
sioned feeling in prayer, which is the poetry of the 
spirit, changes our relation to suffering, and so changes 
suffering itself into peace or joy. 

And now, to sum up all these things. "VVe cannot, dare 
not, ought not to ask God to change the order of nature, 
with uny expectation that He will grant our prayer — yet, 
we must use, such prayers for the sake of expression of 
feeling. And in so. praying to God as our Father, we do 
get rid of half our suffering, though not of that which 
causes our suffering, and even, in a further result, change 
our pain, our punishment, or our misfortune, into causes 
of the peace and joy which flow from the realisation 
of His Presence with us who is the Lover of our souls. 



1 46 The Force of Prayer. 



THE FORCE OF FliAYEH. 

' Ask-, and it shall "be given you ; seek, and ye shall find ; knock, and 
it shall he opened unto you.' — Matt. vii. 7. 

The key-note of my text is the force of Prayer, and it is 
our subject this morning'. We spoke not long ago of 
the difficulties between prayer and science, and I en- 
deavoured to find a common ground on which both 
could endure the existence of the other. 

Our decision was, that if the constancy of force be 
true, those who pray for the slightest change of sequence 
pray for a miracle. When we pray for a shower of 
rain, we ask for as great a miracle as the levelling of 
Monte Rosa to a plain. There is no large or small in 
nature, except to us — and a change infinitely small to 
us' may produce immeasurable results. Unless we are 
prepared, then, to declare that miracles are things 
of daily occurrence — and that destroys the notion of a 
miracle — unless we are prepared to hand over the order 
of the weather to the wants and freaks of religious 
men, we must give up imagining that our prayer can 
change the order of nature, or that God will change it 
at the instance of our- prayer. Prayers for rain, for fine 
weather, and the whole class of prayers which deal with 
physical changes, are impotent so far as these physical 



The Force of Prayer. 147 

changes are concerned. Prayer, unless we assume a 
miracle, lias never altered and does not alter a single 
physical sequence. It has no direct influence on nature. 
The question then arose, whether it had any indirect 
influence, or whether a prayer of this class was of any 
use whatever. "We were forced to consider this, for we 
were met by the fact that the human heart in difficul- 
ties arising from physical causes naturally rushed into 
prayer. It was scarcely possible, we thought, that this 
natural impulse had no meaning and no end* I 
attempted to give an answer to that question, but as I 
left it partly unexplained, I will now add enough, I 
hope, to make it clear. 

Though prayer does not change law, it changes the 
relation of men to law, not physically, but spiritually. 
Take for example a national prayer against a pesti- 
lence. It will not take away the pestilence, but when a 
whole mass of men pray for one thing, attention is 
directed to it, enquiry is set on foot, unity of action is 
supported, and the pestilence is checked by the discovery 
of its causes and their destruction. But if prayer only 
did that, it would do no more than a few vigorous 
speeches made by physicians might do. It does more. 
It puts in motion the mighty engine of moral feel- 
ing ; it makes every man conscious of his national 
responsibility to God for the health of the nation ; it 
kindles the charity which devotes itself to the sick, the 
faith which supports endeavour ; it makes each man feel 
his sinfulness and his need of God, and his connection 
with a Father. And as a consequence of these feelings 
a higher tone pervades and a higher spirit fills the 



1 48 



The Force of Prayer. 



general life of the people,, and the whole effort against 
the pestilence is assisted by the immense force which 
belongs to the spiritual power of men. In this way, 
prayer helps to change man's relation to law, helps to 
pnt him on the side of law. Once on its side, he con- 
quers the pestilence according to law. 

Again, we said that though it was impossible, without 
a miracle, to alter physical phenomena, and therefore 
useless if not too daring to ask God to do so, yet that in 
the case of scarcity, we might ask- God to awake the 
energy and arouse the industry of the farmers ; in the 
case of pestilence to lead scientific men to discovery of 
its causes, and in the case of both to inspire those who 
govern with wise measures. This was, we thought, a 
legitimate prayer, for God acts directly on the spirit 
and intellect of men. But it has been objected to me 
that this making of a lazy, farmer energetic, or the 
inspiration of an idea into a statesman, is in itself a 
miracle. I cannot quite discover the ground of the 
objection, but I suppose that it is founded on the fact 
that thought and emotion are accompanied by vital 
changes in the brain matter, and therefore that the 
introduction from without of new thought is in fact 
equivalent to the introduction of new force. But this' 
goes upon the supposition, of which no proof can be given, 
that motion in the brain is thought and feeling. We 
certainly can conceive of them as distinct from physical 
phenomena, though in us they may always be attended 
with physical changes. Because the thought that two 
and two make four is accompanied by an atomic change, 
it does not follow that that atomic change is the 



The Force of Prayer. 



149 



thought. When a man does a gracious act to a woman 
and she blushes with gratitude, or love, a series of vital 
changes takes place, but it cannot be proved that the 
vital changes are gratitude and love. Therefore I have 
a perfect right to say at present, that the suggestion 
of a thought to a man's mind by God, or the awaking 
in -him of a strong emotion, does not interfere with the 
constancy of force. It does not add new force to the 
sum of force, but it does do this, it does make the modes 
of force interchange, the play of force within its circle 
more rapid. But it will be said that force cannot alter 
its form without a previous touch of force, and that 
therefore the suggestion of thought which alters the 
condition of vital forces must be itself an introduction 
of new force, and therefore impossible. Well, this is 
just the point where we get into the darkness. When 
I will to do a duty, I set up a series of vital changes, 
but in willing alone, have I intruded something new 
into the close-packed realm of force ? or is my will 
itself a mode of physical force ? It seems to me, no ; 
it seems to others, yes. At least it is not proved one 
way or another, and till the materialist has given me 
full proof of his position, I cannot be said to demand 
a miracle, when I say that God speaks directly to the 
spirit of man. 

Moreover, this which is said to be a miracle is done 
every day by man to man. A single sentence from the 
lips' of a scientific man has stirred a whole series of new 
thoughts in another. Averse of the Bible has changed 
a blasphemer into a penitent. A great painting has 
consoled a sorrowful soul. Love has made the coward 



The Force of Prayer. 



brave, the indifferent earnest, the lazy energetic ; and 
God's action on the intellect and the soul, which I 
aver may be secured by prayer, is done in the same 
way as that of man on man, only it is infinitely more 
subtile and great in proportion to His greater power. 

It has nothing to do with miracle. Miracle is a 
change in the ordinary sequence of physical events ; 
this is the action of the spiritual upon the spiritual, 
of mind on mind ; and, if we grant a spiritual world 
at all, it seems to be an action not only perfectly lawful, 
but also agreeing with our own observation of the 
action of our spirit and mind on those of others. 

Once more, miracles are, by the hypothesis, rare. 
Such action as I speak of is ceaseless. Love works such 
direct ' miracles ' every day ; but mark how it works. 
It does not produce any direct change in the physical 
world. All the love in the world will not stop the rising 
wind which threatens to chill your child to the death 
as you stagger belated with her across the snowy moor, 
nor stay the tooth of consumption which is gnawing at 
the life of your husband. But it will make the child 
die in peace looking lovingly into your eyes to the last ; 
it will change the husband who has neglected you into 
a sorrowing and loving man. The two worlds are 
different. Force only acts within force. Spirit acts on 
spirit, and both according to their own laws. Now the 
influence of which I speak does not e^iter into the 
dominion of physical force, and where it touches it, it 
does not interfere with it. 

But our main question to-day is, what is the force of 
prayer ? 



The Force of Prayer. 



It derives its force first from its being the satisfac- 
tion of a want in man. Man needs to worship some 
one. In youth, in manhood, he finds friends, objects of 
still intenser love. But they do not fill the deep abyss 
of his necessity ; the love he bears to them is exclu- 
sive, is partly selfish. In their purest and dearest form 
our affections do not disappoint, but they do not sa- 
tisfy. We are thrown back upon God, not that we 
want to lose the earthly affections, but to fulfil them, 
to hold them involved and hallowed in a perfect ado- 
ration. 

But God — what is the God we worship ? Is it a God 
without us, only the Maker of the universe, the ab- 
solute Source of power, the Lord of law ? That con- 
ception awakens awe, but not love. Try it in your hour 
of unhappiness, and you find while you tremble that you 
hate it. 

What is the God we worship ? Is it only a God within 
us, a spirit moving through our spirit *? We can love 
that, but our love has a tendency to pass into familiarity 
and straightway all the subtile essence of it is gone. It 
disappoints like human love. Or it drifts into an ideal 
Pantheism, and God is confused with that Ego, by 
which alone I become conscious of the universe. Theu 
with the fading of the personality of God fades the 
reality of adoration. 

We must have both, a personal God without us, the 
object of awful veneration — a personal God within us, 
the object of childlike love. Awe and love combined 
are perfect adoration, and in that adoration the soul is 
satisfied, earth is glorified, heaven is in our hearts, and 



152 



The Force of Prayer. 



all our human love raised into something more intense 
and pure when it breathes this air of the Eternal. 

Prayer is the expression of this adoring love, as 
necessary to man as the adoring love is necessary ; and 
till awe ceases to exalt the soul, and love to be its food, 
the soul of man must pray. Men may call prayer, an 
absurdity, deny its work, banish its influence, but nature 
and God will be too strong for them. These men will 
glide into the absurdity they laughed at when their 
heart is passionate with sorrow ; and as to banishing 
its influence — they must banish veneration and love 
from the heart, and then tear away the heart itself, ere . 
they can banish prayer. Its force is here, within us, 
here in the depth of our want. 

But this is a force which is derived from its origin. 
"What is its practical force in life ? One form of its 
force is in its reflex action. It has been remarked by a 
physician, that the physicians who catch infectious 
diseases are those who are afraid or who allow fear to 
master them. It is not difficult to account for this. 
Tear unhinges the nervous system. It causes vital 
changes during which vital force is lost. The disease 
finds the citadel weakened of its defenders, and enters 
in. On the other hand, a man whose sense of duty is 
strong, or whose sympathy with pain is greater than his 
dread, or whose will is master of his nerves, retains his 
nervous energy, loses no force — the disease finds no 
feeble point in the physical defence. This is the reflex 
action of passions on danger. 

In the same way prayer acts with force. It does not 
directly take away a trial or its pain, any more than a 



The Force of Prayer. 



153 



sense of duty directly takes away the danger of in- 
fection, but it preserves the strength of the whole 
spiritual fibre, so that the trial does not pass into 
temptation to sin. A sorrow conies upon you. Omit 
prayer, and you fall out of God's testing into the Devil's 
temptation; you get angry, hard of heart, reckless. 
But meet the dreadful hour with prayer, cast your 
care on God, claim Him as your Father, though He 
seem cruel — and the degrading, paralysing, embittering 
effects of pain and sorrow pass away, a stream of 
sanctifying and softening thoughts pours into the soul, 
and that which might have wrought your fall but works 
in you the peaceable fruits of righteousness. You pass 
from bitterness into the courage of endurance, and from 
endurance into battle, and from battle into victory, 
till at last the trial dignifies and blesses your life. 

And this brings me to another characteristic of the 
force of prayer. It is not altogether effective at once. Its 
action is cumulative. At first there seems no answer to 
your exceeding bitter cry. But there has been an answer; 
God has heard. A little grain of strength, not enough 
to be 'conscious of, has been given in one way or another. 
A friend has come in and grasped your hand — you have 
heard the lark sprinkle his notes like raindrops on the 
earth — a text has stolen into your mind you know not 
how. Next morning , you wake with the old aching at 
the heart, but the grain of strength has kept you alive — 
and so it goes on : hour by hour, day by day, prayer 
brings its tiny spark of light till they orb into a star, 
its grain of strength till they grow into an anchor of 
the soul, sure and stedfast. The answer to prayer is 



154 Force of Prayer. 

slow ; the force of prayer is cumulative. Not till life 
is over is the whole answer given, the whole strength it 
has brought understood. 

And the lady prayed in heaviness 

That looked not for relief, 
And slowly did her succour como 

And a patience to her grief. 
Oh, there is never sorrow of heart 

That shall lack a timely end, 
If but to God we turn and ask 

Of Him to be our friend. 

Again. Its force is not only cumulative, but reliev- 
ing through expression. There are some griefs, some 
passionate moral struggles, some fatal secrets of the 
inner life, which we cannot speak to man. For we 
cannot give men that knowledge of our whole past, 
by which alone its secrets can be justly judged. But 
to our Father who knows all we can speak out. He 
has no conventional maxims by which to measure us, 
no half-experience, no harshness, no jealous injustice 
such as among men demands to be considered love. He 
cannot, therefore, mistake us — we are sure of justice ; 
and it is that, not love alone, which we ask from 
Him if our souls be true. 

Out of the silent loneliness of the heart, then, the 
prayer of confession rises to the Fatherhood of God. 
The weight is lifted off the soul, at least the unbearable- 
ness of it is gone. We have told it all to Him — He 
knew it, it is true — what was the need of telling Him ? 
No need to Him, but comfort to us, for expression gives 
relief to tortured feeling. As long as we kept it, 
brooded over it, it was like air in a sealed room ; it 
grew deadlier, and slowly poisoned all the heart. 



The Force of Prayer. 



155 



Expressed, it was like the same air when, the windows 
thrown open, the sweet spring breeze came flowing in ; 
we rise up — half the horror is gone, half the weight 
of the secret gnilt is lifted off, we begin to feel ashamed 
of having despaired of life ; we begin to feel the duty of 
forgetting sin and pressing forward into the work of 
righteousness. This is the blessed work of prayer to 
God — of simply entrusting to Him all. 

It is no strange mysterious work. It has its ceaseless 
analogies in our every-day life. The morbid youth of the 
German poet poured out all its sickly feeling in his first 
prose novel, and it was gone for ever. Burns, riding 
across the Highland moor, when the sky was dark with 
thunder and the rain fell in accumulating roar, felt his 
heart swell almost to breaking with passionate feeling, 
and sang to himself that battle-hymn in which we hear 
the rushing rain and the elemental war. Elijah on the 
mountain, his heart burning with the desertion of a 
whole people, felt his passion relieved by the earthquake, 
and wind, and fire, and the still small voice represented 
to him the calm which had come upon his stormy heart. 
Jeremiah, indignant with God,* broke into a wild cry, in 
which he gave expression to his pain, and relieved, he 
felt the fire of duty burn bright again, and took up again 
the work of life. And He who was Mankind, burdened 
with untold sorrow in the sorrowful garden, did not 
hide his agony from his Father, though He knew it 
could not be taken from Him, but expressing it, passed 
into the sublime peace with which He drank the cup 



* Jer. xx. 7, 8, 9. 



The Force of Prayer, 



and died. Expression relieves the o'erfraught heart, 
and, the pressure removed, it rebounds into the natural 
strength of health. Wordsworth has said it all : — 

To me alone there came a thought of grief : 
A timely utterance gave that thought relief, 
And I again am strong. 

Yes, if any here are crushed with unshared sorrow, 
eaten with the remorse of unhealed and secret sin, 
chained to a trial which none can understand, and 
therefore wordless to man — spread it before the God 
of kindness and justice, before the God of human 
nature. The method of relief is ready to your hand. 
Make use of prayer. 

Lastly. It has the power of sanctifying life be- 
cause it brings God into life. Twice in the day it has 
been for ages the habit of the race to use this talis- 
man ; once for the sanctification of the day, once for 
the sanctification of the night. The morning praj^er 
chimes in with the joy of the creation, with the quick 
world as it awakes and sings. It ought to bind itself up 
with the rising of the sun, the opening of the flowers, 
the divine service of the birds, the glow of cloudy 
bars on which the rays of light strike like a musician's 
fingers, and whose notes and chords are colour. The 
voice of the world is prayer, and our morning worship 
should be in tune with its ordered hymn of praise. 
But in joy we should recall our weakness, and 
ask His presence who is strength and redemption, 
so that joy may be married to watchfulness by 
humility. Such a prayer is the guard of life. It 
prepares us beforehand for temptation : neglect it and 



The Force of Prayer. 



157 



you fall. It makes us conscious of our Father's 
presence, so that we hear His voice in the hour of our 
folly or our sin. c My child, this morning you called 
Me to your side ; do not drive Me far away. Bridle that 
passionate temper ; restrain that excitement which is 
sweeping you beyond the power of will ; keep back that 
foolish word which will sting your neighbour's heart ; 
do not do that dishonesty; be not guilty of that 
cowardice. I am by your side.' 

That is the thing which prayer makes real. Prayer, 
not only in the morning watch, but prayer sent voice- 
less from the heart from hour to hour. Then life is 
hallowed, wakeful, and calm. It becomes beautiful 
with that beauty of God which eye hath not seen. It 
is not left comfortless, for prayer brings the Saviour to 
our side. In the hour of our grief we hear the voice 
of Christ coming down the ages to our soul, tender as 
the morning light on flowers, 6 Come unto Me, all that 
are weary and heavy laden : I will give you rest/ We 
hear Him as we sit at business, speaking as He spoke 
to Matthew at the receipt of custom, ' Follow Me ; 3 and 
though we know we cannot rise as did the publican, 
for our work is where He has. placed us, yet we know 
its meaning. W e seem to feel his hand in ours in the 
passion of our endeavour to do right when duty and 
interest clash, and his grasp gives firmness to our 
faltering resolution. And when the petty troubles of 
life, the small difficulties which sting like gnats, the 
intrusions, the quarrels, the slight derangements of 
health, have disturbed our temper, • and we are in 
danger of being false to that divine charity which is 



TJu Force of Prayer. 



the dew of life, one prayer will sweep us back to 
Palestine, and standing among the circle of the 
Apostles we shall listen to his voice, 6 Love one another 
as I have loved you.' ( Peace I leave with you, My 
peace I give unto you.' 

And day being hallowed thus, do not omit to make 
holy the night. For whether we sleep a dreamless 
sleep, as if sleep had given us for the time to the arms 
of his brother death, or wander in the land of 6 footless 
fancies,' where the brain and its servants, having 
escaped from their master, will, play at their wild 
pleasure, like things without a soul, we need the pre- 
sence and protection of God. In dead sleep who can tell 
where the spirit has been, what worlds it has seen, what 
lessons it has received, what thoughts have become 
entwined with it — thoughts of which we are not con- 
scious, but which appear like strangers afterwards, 
we cannot tell from whence, within the brain. 

Hallow these possible voyages by committing your 
spirit into the hands of God. 

But still more we need His watchfulness, or, since He 
is always watchful, our suppressed consciousness of it, 
when sleep opens the ivory gate, and we flitter through 
the fairy life of dreamland. 

It is not beauty alone which we encounter there, but 
mystery more mysterious than that of earth strange 
words which seem to be warnings ; impressions so vivid 
that they stamp the day ; pain and pleasure so sharp 
that we cry or dread to dream again ; noble thoughts, 
pure shapes of the imagination, which, unremembered 
in detail, yet leave behind an inspiring sense of the 



The Force of Prayer. 



159 



infinite things the soul may do 5 temptations to sin, cruel 
and impure thoughts, terror even and horror which 
open to us more dreadful depths of guilt and pain than 
we can realise awake. 

Take, by the power of prayer, through this wild land 
of dreams, the sanctifying presence of One who loves us. 
Claim it every night, and it will attend to hallow the 
fancies of sleep, to save us from the baseness of dream- 
fear, to call back the wandering fancy from impurity. 
For prayer, continually lived in, makes the presence 
of a holy and loving God the air which life breathes 
and by which it lives, so that, as it mingles consciously 
with the work of the day, it becomes also a part of 
every dream. 

To us, then, it will be no strange thing to enter 
Heaven, for we have been living in the things of 
Heaven. They have even here become realities, and 
when we step across the drawbridge of death, it is no 
foreign land we enter, but our native Home. Only the 
communion with our Father which we have felt here 
through prayer, shall there be so profoundly greater 
that prayer will be no more, and praise be all in all. 



i6o 



Immortality. 



IMMORTALITY. 

1 For lie is not a God of the dead, but of the living : for all live unto 
him.' — Luke xx. 38. 

Theee is a common reason for the perverse denial 
of immortality. It is, that man, when living solely for 
this world, cannot believe in a world to come. He who 
is blind has no conception of the stars. He who is 
withont passion cannot believe in enthusiasm . He 
who lives for himself cannot believe in self-devotion. 

And he who is living a base life cannot believe in a 
noble one. If his sonl is plunged in the sensual, he 
cannot realise the spiritual. When his whole energies 
are given to this world, he cannot conceive or possess 
the world to come. There are, then, thousands of men 
calling themselves Christians, to whom immortal life 
is merely a name, to whom their little life is indeed 
6 rounded with a sleep.' 

Practically, they disbelieve in immortality. They 
may even inwardly go further, and deny it to them- 
selves, should the question intrude upon their pleasure. 
But they do not deny it before the world. Something 
holds them back from boasting of their unbelief ; a 
consciousness that they have thrown aside a noble 
thing, a regret which will steal in, that now they can 



Immortality. 161 

no longer aspire beyond their present life. Unable to 
realise immortality themselves, they yet shrink from 
an open denial of it with a sense of shame and degra- 
dation. But still more, it becomes a dreadful thing to 
them, if they have any sensitive reverence left for the 
sorrow of Mankind, to throw doubt upon this doctrine. 
If true, it is so precious that it seems the race might 
bear any suffering provided it was its fate at last ; if it 
is only held to be false and not proved false, a man 
may well doubt whether, on his own judgment alone, 
he should proclaim that he holds it false. There is 
a devotion to one's own truthfulness which is, in cer- 
tain circumstances, intolerable cruelty to others, and, in 
spiritual matters, where proof has not been attained, 
unless we clearly feel that to disclose our opinion is 
good for man, we are only Pharisees anxious to placard 
our honesty when we, loudly proclaim our negations in 
public or in private. Truthfulness without charity is 
a vice and not a virtue, -as love without truthfulness 
to moral right becomes idolatry. 

And men in general have felt this, and when they 
disbelieved in immortality have held their tongue. 

Moreover, they have refrained, because they insen- 
sibly felt that the denial of immortality is practically 
atheism. Clinging still to the notion of a God, they 
connect with Him their ideas of right and wrong. He 
is their source, and He allots their sanctions. But no 
one can long continue to believe in and to love a God 
who is assumed to give us these ideas, and then so 
forgets all about His gift and His creature as to plunge 

obedience and disobedience into the same nothingness 5 
8 



1 6 2 Immortality. 



or who by wilfully annexing annihilation to all human 
lives alike, proclaims that in His eyes, Tiberius, rotting 
to a shameless death in Caprea, is on the same level 
with the Saviour dying on Calvary for the Truth. One 
must feel that such a God would be wicked. He would 
deny that very morality which we imagine He has 
implanted in us. We should be obliged to deny His 
existence in order to retain our morality. To disbelieve 
in immortality is to disbelieve in God : with the fall of 
the one, falls the other. 

And this also men have felt, and I know no instance 
where the denial of immortality has not led directly to 
atheism. Men did not like to realise, by putting their 
denial of immortality into speech, that they did not 
practically believe in God at all. 

But these motives have now ceased to operate, at least 
to the same extent. Matters have taken a new phase. 
Immortality is boldly or quietly denied, not only by 
impure and selfish men, but by men of culture and of a 
high morality. It is accompanied, as it must neces- 
sarily be, by latent or overt atheism, as a cause or a 
result of the denial. 

What are the particular causes of this denial at 
present ? One is the prevalence of certain theological 
views which, once largely accepted, are now felt to be 
repugnant to the moral sense. Good men, some 
among the best and holiest of the. race, have held 
these views, and lived and died by them. And it is a 
strong proof that theological opinions have no necessary 
connection with goodness that these men have been so 
good. It proves also that we cannot judge the morality 
of one time, so far as it relates to the morality of 



Immortality. 163 

opinions, by the morality of another time. l 1 or few 
donbted then of the accordance of these opinions with 
moral right ; and now many persons, distinctly, and it 
seems to me with truth, reject them as immoral. 

Among these, the first is the conception of God. 
The conception of God's nature which has been laid 
before us for many years, has brought many men at 
last to turn away from it with dismay and pain. They 
feel that the morality of the pulpit on this matter lags 
behind the moral feeling of society. God has been 
represented, they think, and I think with them, as 
selfish, as seeking His own glory at the expense of His 
creatures' welfare, as jealous, as arbitrary, as indul- 
ging in favouritism, as condemning all for the sake of 
one, as insisting on forms of temporary importance 
and binding them for ever on the conscience, as ruining 
men for mistakes in doctrine, as claiming a blind sub- 
mission of the conscience and the intellect, as vindic- 
tive, as the resolute torturer of the greater part of the 
human race by an everlasting punishment which pre- 
supposes everlasting evil ; as, in one word, anything 
rather than the Father revealed in Jesus Christ. 
Much of this teaching remains still, though it is pre- 
sented under a veil by which its coarser outlines are 
modified. It is accepted by many who either do not 
possess a strong and individual sense of morality, or 
who do not think, or prefer not to think on the matter, 
lest they should shake the fabric of their easy faith or 
spoil their religious sentiment. But, those who do, 
and whose moral feeling of right and wrong is sane 
and strong, turn away revolted from a God of this 



Immortality. 



character, believe that to be immortally connected with 
Him would be degradation, even the very horror of hell. 

But not having been taught any other God, and 
being, to a certain degree, culpably lazy about exa- 
mining into the teaching of Christianity for themselves, 
they fall back on their last resource, and disbelieve in 
immortality. c It is better to perish for ever, than to be 
the slave of such a ruler. We deny his existence, 
and we deny the immortality he is said to promise. 
But, at the same time, we will be true to our sense of 
right and wrong ; we will do what we can to help the 
race ; we will have our immortality in the memories of 
the future, or in the " Being of Humanity but, as for 
ourselves, let us cease, for we could not live with the 
Being who has been described fco us.' 

Now, I believe this to be, and no one need mistake 
my meaning, a really healthy denial of immortality, 
for it is founded on the denial of a false God. And 
so far as it is founded on the assertion of a true mo- 
rality, so far it is, though these men do not confess it 
as such, the assertion of the trae God. The God who 
has been preached to men of late has now become to 
us an idol, that is, a conception of God lower than we 
ought to frame, and a revolt against that conception 
is not in reality a revolt against God ; it is a protest 
against idolatry. I sympathise strongly, then, with 
that part of the infidel effort which is directed against 
these immoral views of God's character, though I am 
pained by the manner in which the attack is conducted 
— and it is my hope that the attack will lead our 
theologians to bring their teaching up to the level of 




Immortality. 



the common moral feeling on this subject, and to reveal 
God as the Father of men in all the profound meaning 
of that term. The belief in immortality will then re- 
turn, for the love of God will return to men. For it is 
impossible for any man to clearly see and believe in the 
Father as revealed in Christ and not passionately de- 
sire to draw nearer and nearer to Him for ever, and 
not feel that he must live and continue to live for ever. 
Therefore, in order to restore to men such as I have 
described a belief in immortality, we must restore to 
them a true conception of God. This is, this ought to 
be, the main work of the preachers and teachers of this 
time. For as long as the morality of the pulpit hangs 
behind the morality of religious-minded men, those 
religious-minded men will be infidels. 

Again, another reason for the prevalent disbelief in 
immortality is the selfish theory of religious life. That 
theory has almost died away among religious teachers, 
but the reaction against it still continues. We have 
given it up, but it is still imputed to us by our infidel 
opponents. 

It is §aid that we are to do good in order to be 
rewarded, and to avoid evil, lest we should be punished. 
In this doctrine, baldly stated as it has been, there is 
nothing which appeals to the nobler feelings of man. 
Selfish gratification and selfish fear are alone addressed. 
It is a direct appeal to that part of our being which is 
the meanest, as if that were the part which could most 
readily accept religion. It connects us to God by bonds 
of self-interest, as a servant to a patron, not by bonds, 
of love, as a child to a father. 



166 



Immortality. 



Against this, theory many rose in revolt, declaring 
that according to it the desire of immortal life was a 
selfish desire, and proposing, as an escape from this 
selfishness, that men shonld live a noble life without 
hopes for the future. They set this forth as the highest 
form of self-sacrifice. 6 Live,' they said, ' doing good, 
without' hope of reward, only for the sake of good — 
hating and fighting with evil, because evil is degradation, 
not because it is punished. You cannot do this if you 
accept the Christian doctrine of immortal life. For it 
nourishes selfishness. It locks a man up in care for 
his own safety. On the highest religious grounds, we 
deny the doctrine of immortality as prejudicial to a 
noble and pious life.' 

And if that were really the Christian doctrine, they 
would do well in denying it, and we might be -driven 
to accept their fine-sounding theory of self-sacrifice. 

But we meet it, first, by a blunt contradiction of the 
false representation of Christianity, from which it has 
sprung as a reaction. Christianity says precisely what 
these men say, only not in so abstract a manner. It 
asks us to do good, not for the sake of abstract good, 
but for the sake of being like to God — the personal 
goodness. That is not a selfish doctrine, nor does it 
lead to selfishness. It urges us to avoid evil, lest we 
should become unlike God, in whose image we are, 
and whose temple we become. That is not a selfish 
motive. It takes us out of self, and makes our life con- 
sist in living in God, and because He lives in all the 
race, in living through Him in the interests and lives 
of all our brother-men. That is not a selfish doctrine. 



Immortality. 



167 



Its reward is not a selfish reward; it is the reward 
of being made unselfish, because made like to God. 
6 Your reward/ said Christ, 6 shall be great, for ye shall 
be the children of your Father ; 5 that is, resembling 
your Father in character. 

Nor does Christianity appeal to fear of punishment, 
but to the feeling of love. It does not say menacingly, 
< Thou shalt not kill, or steal, or be an idolater ; ' it says, 
* Love the Lord thy God with all thy soul, and thy 
neighbour as thyself,' for then, since thou lovest, thou 
canst not injure thy neighbour, or sin against God. 
It rejects fear as having torment, as belonging to a 
spirit of bondage, not a spirit of life. It appeals 
throughout to self-sacrifice, self-devotion. It asks us to 
live by all that is noblest in us, to walk worthy of our 
high vocation — likeness to Christ, who died for men. 
It does not proclaim the selfish doctrine on which this 
denial of immortality is founded. 

But it is plain that it does declare rewards and 
punishments; and an objector may say, that even on 
the supposition tl^at Christianity does not really appeal 
to the selfish feeling, yet that the introduction of the 
element of rewards has in itself a tendency to produce 
selfish feeling. 

Certainly, we answer, if the rewards are material, if 
they belong in any way to the selfish part of our 
nature. But if they have nothing to do with that, but 
with that part of our being which lives by the denial of 
self and the practice of self-devotion, if they are purely 
spiritual rewards, to long after them is not selfish, but 
the high duty of the soul. God says, ' Do good, and 



1 68 Immortality. 

you are rewarded.' How ? By an increased power of 
doing good. Is it selfish to desire that? God says, 
6 Love me, love your brother-men with all your heart, 
and you shall be rewarded.' How ? By deeper capa- 
bility of loving. Is it selfish to desire that ? The true 
statement of the doctrine of rewards at once dissipates 
this absurd accusation of selfishness. 

To look forward to this increase of the spiritual life, 
to this daily growth of unselfishness, and to live and 
act in the hope of that and for its sake; it is ridi- 
culous to call that a selfish theory. To do good, and 
to think of the reward of being loved by God and of 
becoming more like to God, is no more a selfish life 
than to spend one's whole life for one's country, and to 
rejoice in the idea of being loved by one's country, and 
becoming more worthy of her love, is selfish for the 
high-hearted soldier. A life of love lived in the hope 
of the reward of becoming more capable of love, does 
not encourage in the heart a single germ of selfishness. 

And as to immortal life itself, if you choose to sepa- 
rate it for a moment from these spiritual qualities of 
love, and purity, and truth (which in us are immortal 
life) the desire of life, keener, purer, more abounding, 
cannot be selfish. For it is a natural appetite of the 
human spirit. 

Now the lawful gratification of appetite is not 
selfish. No one is so absurd as to say that the desire 
of food or drink when we are hungry or thirsty, for 
the sake of relieving these appetites, is a selfish desire. 
No one says that the desire of knowledge for the sake 
of knowing is a selfish desire. It is a noble appetite of 



Immortality. 



169 



the intellect. Yet here, when we get into the realm of 
the spirit of man, we are told that the desire of 
immortal life for the sake of life, and that acting for the 
purpose of being a partaker of that life, is selfish, and 
encourages selfishness. It is a greater absurdity than 
the others. Desire of life is the most natural appetite 
of the spirit, and we are in desperate peril of becoming 
truly selfish when we crush it, or caricature it, or at- 
tempt to live without it. 

Indeed, that is often the result. I do not speak now 
of those who replace the doctrine of personal immortality 
by the mystical and unpractical notion of an immortality 
in the race, for these at least allow of the existence of 
a longing and passion for immortality, of which they 
are bound to take notice ; nor of those who frankly, on 
scientific grounds, avow that they do not believe in the 
existence of a spirit in man apart from his mortal frame, 
but of those who quietly, on the fantastic ground of 
the selfishness of this passion, deprive the race of one 
of the mighty hopes which make us men. 

On the whole, mankind resents this, and resents it 
justly. It separates itself from these men who have 
separated themselves from the common longing. They 
feel their isolation, and retire from the world. Or they 
become angry with the world, and mock and scorn its 
aspirations. Or they seclude themselves and their 
theory in Pharisaic dignity, and thank Fate that they 
are not as other men are, blinded by superstition, but 
seated aloft in the clear light of unapproachable self- 
sacrifice — the martyrs of a grand idea. 

The end of it all is that they become as self-involved 



170 



Immortality. 



as tlie Simeon Stylites of the poet, as self-righteous, and 
as self-conceited. Aiming at the utter denial of self, 
they arrive at the 'utter assertion of self. 

And this result follows, because the self-sacrifice put 
forward by these theorists is not self-sacrifice at all, but 
the immolation of the best and most aspiring part of 
our nature. They give up what is good, and call it 
self-sacrifice. It is an inversion of the truth, for self- 
sacrifice is surrendering what is wrong, or pleasurable, 
for the sake of good to others. There are certain ne- 
cessary elements in an act of true self-sacrifice. It 
must be in itself a moral act, and distinctly felt as such 
by the actor, else one throws the halo of self-surrender 
over evil ; it must not be merely instinctive, but done 
with a rational belief that it will produce good ; and 
the doer of it must not give up or weaken any element 
in his nature, the existence and strong existence of 
which, even in a single individual, is of importance for 
the progress of the race. It is not self-sacrifice to 
crucify a high desire for the sake of attaining an 
ideal. It is not self-sacrifice to give up what is true 
for the sake of being more true. That is as absurd 
as giving up one friend for the sake of being a more 
perfect friend to another. You do not gain, but lose 
so much of power of friendship. And those who sur- 
render the hope of immortal life, for the sake of being 
freed from all thought of self, do not gain the self-sacri- 
ficing heart, they only take away one of the motive 
powers of self-sacrifice. 

On the whole, we want clearer notions of self-sacri- 
fice. There are some things we have no right to 



Immortality. 



give up. It is not self-sacrifice to surrender our con- 
science, though we might save a whole nation bj doing 
so. It is not self-sacrifice to be false to our own soul, 
for the sake of those we love, as the martyr would have 
been had he worshipped Jupiter, because his father and 
mother wept at his feet, and were left to ruin by his 
death. It is not self-sacrifice to commit suicide, as in 
some novels, for the sake of the happiness of others. 
It is not self-sacrifice to marry one who loves you,, 
because you do not wish him or her to suffer, when 
you do not love in return — it is self-destruction. It 
is not self-sacrifice to cast aside immortality, that it 
may not vitiate by a taint of self your doing good. It 
is spiritual suicide ; nay, more, there is a hidden selfish- 
ness in it, for he who does this is endeavouring to 
secure his own ideal at the expense of the race of men 
whom he deprives of the hope which more than all else 
has cheered and strengthened them in the battle against 
evil. It is selfish to wilfully shut our eyes to this, that 
we may indulge a fancy of our own. 

Tor the sake of right reason, if not for the sake of 
God, do not let yourself be tricked out of your belief in 
immortality by a subtile seeming good, by an appeal to a 
false idea of self-sacrifice. First cast aside the theology 
which has given rise to this twisted notion of self-sacri- 
fice, and then with a clear judgment you will recognise 
that the true self-sacrifice is not incompatible with the 
reward of that immortal life which is in itself nothing 
less than the life of self-sacrifice. Tour smile will then 
be a quiet smile when men tell you to give up longing 
for immortality, because it is a selfish ground of action. 



172 Immortality. 

What, you will say, is it selfish to hope to be for ever 
unselfish, is it selfish to desire to be at one with the 
life of Him who finds his life in giving Himself away ? 
Ts it selfish to aspire to that fuller life which is found 
in living in the lives of others by watchful love of them ? 
These are my rewards, and every one of them ministers 
to and secures unselfishness. 

Lastly, there is another reason for the denial of im- 
mortality, which arises from- theological teaching. It 
is the extremely dull and limited notions of the future 
life. We have too much transferred to our northern 
Christianity and our active existence of thought the 
Oriental conceptions of heaven drawn from the book of 
the Revelation. We have taken them literally instead 
of endeavouring to win the spiritual thoughts of which 
these descriptions are but the form. And literally taken 
they are wholly unsuitable to our Teutonic nature. They 
make the future life seem to our minds a lazy dreamy 
existence, in which all that is quickest and most vital in 
us would stagnate, in which all that makes life interest- 
ing, dramatic, active, would perish. It is not needless 
to notice this. For it is astonishing how even among 
men who should have known better, the early childish 
conceptions of heaven remain as realities. I have* met 
active-minded working-people, and cultivated men, who 
looked forward with dislike to death, because they 
dreaded the dulness of the next world. Till we have a 
higher, more human conception of the future life than 
that usually given, we shall not restore to society a joy- 
ful belief in immortality. Our theology wants a picture 
of the world to come, fitted to meet a larger and a 



Immortality. 



worthier ideal of humanity. If we wish to awake 
interest in the future life, we must add to the merely 
spiritual ideas of uncultivated teachers, others which 
will minister food to the imagination, the intellect, the 
social and national instincts of man ; nay, more, if we 
believe in the resurrection of the body, others which 
minister to the delight of the purified senses. 

We need only go back to the revelation of Christ to 
gain the true ground of this wider conception. He 
revealed God as each man's Father. Now the highest 
work of a father is education, and the end of God's edu- 
cation of man is the finished and harmonious develop- 
ment of all his powers. If in the future life our intellect 
or imagination is left undeveloped, it is not education ; 
and we cannot conceive of a perfect fatherhood. If 
all our powers have not there their work and their 
opportunities of expansion, the full idea of fatherhood 
is lost. If any of our true work here on earth is fruitless 
work, and does not enable us to produce tenfold results 
in a future life, no matter what that work may be, work 
of the artist, historian, politician, merchant, then the 
true conception of education, and therefore of God's 
fatherhood, is lost. 

No, brethren, we rest on this, 6 1 go to prepare a place 
for you.' A place is prepared for each one of us ; a place 
fitted to our distinct character, a separate work fitted 
to develope that character into perfection, and in the 
doing of which we shall have the continual delight of 
feeling that we are growing ; a place not only for us, 
but for all our peculiar powers. Our ideals shall become 
more beautiful, and minister continually to fresh aspira- 



i/4 



Immortality. 



tion, so that stagnation will be impossible. Feelings 
for which, we found no food here, shall there be satisfied 
with work, and exercised by action into exquisite per- 
fection. Faint possibilities of our nature, which came 
and went before us here like swallows on the wing, 
shall there be grasped and made realities. The outlines 
of life shall be filled up, the rough statue of life shall be 
finished. We shall be not only spiritual men, but men 
complete in Christ, the perfect flower of humanity. 

And this shall be in a father's home, where all the 
dearest dreams of home-life shall find their happy ful- 
filment ; in a perfect society, where all the charming 
interchange of thought and giving and receiving of each 
other's good which make our best happiness on earth, 
shall be easier, freer, purer, more intimate, more spiri- 
tual, more intellectual ; and lastly, in a perfect polity, 
6 fellow-citizens with the saints,' where all the interests 
of large national life shall find room and opportunities 
for development 5 and binding all together, the omni- 
present Spirit of love, goodness, truth, and life, whom 
we call God, and whom we know in Jesus Christ, shall 
abide in us, and we in Him, 6 for He is not a God of 
the dead, but of the living : for all live unto Him.' 



-Immortality, 



175 



IMMORTALITY. 

1 For he is not a God of the dead, hut of the living : for all live unto 
him.' — Luke xx. 38. 

It is remarkable that the 'theological questions which 
are now most widely spoken of are no longer those 
which presuppose a general confession of Christianity, 
but other and deeper questions altogether; questions 
the very discussion of which shows how strongly the 
foundations of the religious world are moved. It is now 
frequently asked whether there be a God or not, whether 
immortality be not a mere idol of the imagination. It 
is plain, when society has got down to these root ques- 
tions, that modern theology in its past form has no 
longer the power to do its work, otherwise these things 
would be axioms. It is plain that, if Christianity is to 
keep its ground, it must go through a revolution, and 
present itself in a new form to the minds of men. 

It is the characteristic excellence of Christianity that 
it is able to do this. For with regard to his own religion 
the saying of Christ remains for ever true — that saying 
which declares the continued progress of Revelation, 
£ I have yet many things to say to you, but ye cannot 
bear them now.' * 

But when the time draws near for the growth of 



1 76 Immortality. 

Christian thought around a new idea, and for the re- 
generation of Christian practice by the life which flows 
from the fresh thought, the change is heralded by the 
appearance, sometimes in infidel teaching, sometimes in 
isolated religious teachers, of scattered and disconnected 
truths, which do not naturally belong to the old form of 
religion, or which are set up in opposition to it. Being 
half-truths, or isolated truths, they point forward to a 
complete form which shall supplement and include 
them. At the present day many of the new truths, 
or rather, of the extensions of the old truths, which 
Christianity will have to absorb, are to be found in 
infidel teaching, combined with a rejection of immor- 
tality and of the being of a God. We shall search 
for those truths to-day, and try to show that without 
the doctrine of immortality they have no lasting value, 
but that in union with it they are of real importance," 
and ought to be claimed for Christianity. 

But first, let us examine for a* moment what is taking 
place at present with regard to Christian and infidel 
teaching. 

During the time when an old form of Christian 
thought is slowly passing away, having exhausted all it 
Lad to give, it repeats again and again with the garrulity 
of old age the phrases which in its youth were the ex- 
pressions of living thought and feeling. They fitted 
then the wants of men, and they were the means by 
which religious life advanced and religious truth 
developed. But being naturally cast into a fixed intel- 
lectual system, they remained behind $ie movement they 
began ; they made men grow, but men outgrew them, 



Immortality. 



177 



for systems become old, but mankind is always young. 
It follows, then, almost of necessity, that when a certain 
point in this progress is reached, there will be a strong- 
reaction against the old form of Christianity, and the 
reaction, will contain the assertion of that which is want- 
ing in the dying phase, and a protest against its weak- 
ness. Both the assertion and the protest will often be 
combined with infidel teaching, for there will be many 
who, seeing these garments of Christianity rotting away, 
and hearing them declared to be Christianity itself, 
will believe the declaration, and attack not only the gar- 
ments bnt the living spirit itself which is waiting to 
be reclothed. The infidel teaching on religious subjects 
will then consist of two parts, a negative and a positive 
part. The negative will deny or ignore all Christian 
truth as then taught; the positive will assert some 
ideas necessary for the present time and answering to 
some of its religious wants. It is the business of 
Christian teachers, while setting aside the negations, 
to claim as their own those positive ideas which, though 
developed in a foreign soil, are yet derived from Chris- 
tian seeds. They will say, ' We have learnt from our 
enemies ; they have told us what the age desires. In 
answer to that desire they have unwittingly fallen back 
upon Christian ideas and expanded them, led uncon- 
sciously thereto by the ever-working spirit of God. 
Those expansions are ours ; we did not see them before, 
but we claim them now.' If we do that, the infidelity 
of the infidel, that is, his negations, will slowly share 
the fate of all negations ; and the scattered truths he 
teaches, taken into Christianity, find in it their vital 



i 7 8 



Immortality. 



union with all its past, and form stepping-stones for its 
future growth. 

This is the general sketch of the movement in which 
we are now involved. We are at that point in it in 
which we are beginning to recognise that the infidel is 
teaching a few truths which naturally belong to Chris- 
tianity. But we have not yet fully assimilated those 
truths, or established their connection with those we 
possess. Not till that is done will our wider form of 
Christian thought be completed. 

Let us take the two main forms of infidelity which pre- 
vail—secularism and Comtism ; the first, widely spread 
among the working-classes ; the second — the religion of 
positivism, to call it by its other name — held by a small 
number of the cultivated class. 

Both of these hold in them ideas which ought to be 
ours. It is said that these ideas are foreign to Chris- 
tianity. On the contrary, I believe that they are the 
children of Christianity born in an alien land, and 
moreover, that they fit more harmoniously into the 
Christian system than into the system with which they 
are now united. 

Of the coarse brutal secularism which does nothing 
but deny and bluster, I have nothing to say ; but there 
is another form of it which does not so much deny as 
say, c We do not know ; there may be another life to 
come, there may be a God, but we cannot prove these 
things. They are wrapped in mystery ; they leave us 
in the mystery. God, if there be a God, gives no an- 
swer to us. All the feelings which we are asked to 
feel about Him, all the hopes and fears which cluster 



Immortality. 



179 



round the doctrine of immortality, only hinder onr 
practical work, make us think of ourselves and not of 
our duty; nay, more, they do harm, for more suffering and 
evil have come upon the race, more cruelty and more 
hindrances to progress have arisen from these notions 
than from any others. We will put them utterly aside, 
and act by faith in other ideas. 5 

This is their denial, and even from this we may learn 
much. For the God the conscientious secularist denies 
is the God of whom we spoke last Sunday — a God of 
arbitrary will, who makes salvation depend on assent 
to certain systems of theology, and men responsible 
for sins committed before they were born ; who dooms 
the greater part of the race to eternal wickedness. 
And the immortality he does not care for is an immor- 
tality based on the selfish doctrine of which we also 
spoke, which by working on the fears and greed oi 
men produces persecution in public and continual brood- 
ing on self in private — above all, which destroys uncon- 
scious aspiration. Looking at this, we learn our faults ; 
we are driven back to that conception of a Father which 
Christ revealed. We are taught to preach a loftier view 
of the nature of immortal life. We turn and say to the 
secularist, 6 The God whom you reject we reject ; the 
immortality you deny, we deny also. 5 

But we may learn much more from what he asserts 
as his religion. He believes that nature contains all 
things necessary for the guidance of mankind, that 
duty consists in a steadfast pursuit, according to the 
laws of nature, of results tending to the happiness of the 
race 3 and that in doing that duty he becomes happy. 



i8o 



Immortality. 



His God is duty, his Bible is nature, his heaven, is in the 
happiness of man and the progress of mankind to per- 
fection. His sin is in violating natural laws, because 
such a violation is sure to bring evil on men. 

The two main ideas running through this we ought 
to learn to make more prominent in Christianity — the 
idea that man has a higher duty to mankind than to 
himself, the idea of the progress of the race to perfec- 
tion. The first is distinctly contained in the whole 
spirit of the life of Christ ; the second in the Christian 
conception of God's Fatherhood. But there is no 
doubt that our Christianity has not sufficiently dwelt 
on these thoughts, and that the Christianity of the future 
must absorb them. "We accept then with thankfulness 
this teaching from without, but we say that to fulfil it 
in action and to bring it home to the hearts and lives 
of men, there must be added to it the Christian ideas of 
God and of immortality. The absence of these deprives 
the secularist of any certain ground for that reverence 
for human nature and for that faith in ultimate per- 
fection without which there can be no joyous self-sacri- 
fice for man, no unfaltering work for his progress. 
Their absence deprives him of the mighty impulse which 
arises from a profound love for an all-loving person, and 
replaces it by the weaker impulse which is born of love 
to an abstraction called duty, or to a 'Humanity' which 
is always disappointing the love which is lavished on it, 
till our love, feeding on imperfection, becomes itself en- 
feebled or corrupt. Their absence deprives him of the 
idea which more than all others makes a religious so- 
ciety coherent — that all its members are held together 



/ 

Immortality. 181 - 

by the indwelling in each, and in the whole, of one per- 
sonal spirit of good ; of the idea which makes work for 
human progress persistent— that all work done here is 
carried to perfection in a kindlier world, not only in the 
everlasting life of each worker, but in the mighty whole 
of a human race destined to slowly form itself, through 
the undying labour of each and all in God, into the 
full-grown man. And, finally, their absence deprives him 
of any large power of appeal to those deep-seated feel- 
ings of awe, mystery, and adoration, which are drawn 
out in men by the idea of God ; and which are, when • 
linked to the inspiration which flows from the love of 
a perfect man, the source of that enthusiasm which 
supports and continues a religion. 

Practically, then, we should expect a priori, that 
secularism, on account of its negation of God and 
immortality, could not float its noble ideas. And this 
is really the fact ; it has had many followers, but the 
greater number do not remain in it ; they change out 
of it into many Christian sects, or they pass from entire 
unbelief into credulity. Some are the victims of remote 
and strange phases of fanaticism ; others, like Robert 
Owen, end in the opposite extreme of c spiritualism.' 

!N"or have the societies or sects of secularism any co- 
herence; none of them can keep up a permanent organi- 
sation, and their quarrels are as bitter as they say that 
those of Christians are. The very best among them 
pass through life doing their duty to the last, but in a 
kind of mournful hopelessness, their heart unsatisfied 
though their intellect may be at rest ; for there is, deep 
down in their minds, the painful suspicion that clinging 



182 



Immortality. 



to negations may after all be itself as blind a super- 
stition as any of those which they attack. 

To sum up all, there are a few ideas in secularism 
which owe their origin to the insensible growth of the 
ideas of Christ among men. These ideas are in advance 
of the accepted Christianity of this day, but they are 
inoperative in secularism. When we take them into 
connection with the belief in God and immortality, they 
will become operative, but they will modify the present 
form of Christianity. 

Secondly, we consider the religion of positivism in 
the same light. It maintains, though in a different and 
more cultured form, the same views on these points as 
secularism. But it avoids negations for the most part, 
and confines itself to saying that Christianity has 
nothing more to give to man ; that its good influence is 
.exhausted for the western nations. In it the Christian 
doctrine of God and immortality entirely disappears. In 
spite of this, and far more than secularism, it has drunk 
deep of the spirit of Christianity : most of its doctrines 
may be directly inferred from the teaching of Christ 
and the Apostles, and in fact are unconsciously derived 
from it. Only it is to be said, that the accredited Chris- 
tianity of the day has not yet arrived at these expan- 
sions- of Christian ideas, that, so far, the followers of 
Comte 's religion are in front of us, and that we ought, 
in spite of the curious and infidel surrounding of these 
new thoughts, to claim them as by right our own and 
embody them in Christianity. 

The future Christianity will have to take into itself 



Immortality. 



183 



sucli doctrines as social and international self-sacrifice, 
which is a direct and logical expansion of the Christian 
doctrine of self-sacrifice. It is surprising, if anything 
is surprising, that we have not done this already ; that 
in our pulpits we only speak of the self-sacrifice of one 
person for another, and almost nothing of the duty of 
the citizen to sacrifice himself for his parish, for social 
ends, for the State ; of the duty of nations to sacrifice 
their own interests for the sake of the community of 
nations, and of the duty of the community of nations to 
sacrifice much in the present for the sake of the future 
welfare of the whole race. Nor must we leave out 
other positivist doctrines, such as the necessity of giving 
to each of the human faculties their appropriate work 
in connection with a large idea of religion — a doctrine 
contained, as I think, in S. Paul's view of the relation 
of gifts and of distinct characters to the growth of the 
race in God, and of the working* of these differing gifts 
by a divine spirit for that purpose ; nor yet that other 
doctrine of the sanctification of all human effort to the 
good of man, so that social feeling may be victorious 
over self-love, which is in fact the re-declaration, in a 
wider form than we declare it, of the whole aim and 
spirit of Christ's life ; nor yet that other doctrine of the 
union of science, art, and morality into an harmonious 
whole, under the regenerating influence of the worship 
of humanity — a conception which we shall take, and 
only change by replacing the worship of humanity by 
the worship of the Christ as the representative and 

* 1 All these worketh that one and the selfsame Spirit, dividing to every 
man severally as he will.' 



Immortality. 



concentration into an ideal man of the whole race as it 
is in God ; nor yet, finally, that other idea of the race as 
one great Being ever living and moving on by the service 
of each to the use of the whole, which is, in truth, the 
idea of the race as 6 the full-grown man ' laid down by 
S. Paul in the Epistle to the Ephesians, adding, however, 
to this last thought that which gives it reality and con- 
crete form — the belief in One who is the federal Head of 
this great Being, because He is Himself in perfection 
that which the race is as yet imperfectly. These are the 
doctrines which we gladly receive as expansions of our 
Christianity, and by which we modify our present form 
of it. 

But we shall absorb them, retaining that which 
the religion of positivism leaves out as unnecessary, 
but without which, as we think, these new ideas die 
of starvation — the belief in the Being of a loving 
Father, and in the endless life of each and all. That 
there does exist in man the desire of adoring an 
all-embracing Being, and the desire of immortality, 
positivism, unlike secularism, is too wise to deny, and 
it attempts to provide for these two passions in its 
religion. Instead of God, it presents us with humanity 
conceived of as a vast organism composed of all men 
and women who have lived for the sake of mankind. 
This is the Being we are to worship, and of whom we 
ourselves are part ; we devote our thoughts to the know- 
ledge of her, our afflictions to her love, our actions to 
her service. To become, in the thoughts of men, at 
one with this Being whose life renews itself through- 
out all time, and to be commemorated and loved by 



Immortality. 185 

men to come, to have our immortality in the continued 
existence and affection of the race — this is the reward 
and this the eternal life which this religion offers to 
our acceptance. 

Well, if such an object of worship, and such an 
immortality, satisfy the passions and longings, the 
existence of which the positivist confesses in others, it 
will be very strange. He allows that they do not 
satisfy men as at present constituted, that the old 
feelings must be driven out before the new gospel be 
received. But we are told that education from the 
positivist point of view will transfer the feelings now 
expended on God to this new Being, and that the 
aspirations which now cluster round immortality will 
have their satisfaction in the delio-ht of having our 
work interwoven with the progress of mankind. 
Against these assertions one can only appeal to time 
for a full reply. But it does seem true that men, if 
they worship, wish to worship what is perfect and 
absolute, and that the worship of an imperfect and 
growing humanity cannot ever satisfy their witm. 
And it also seems true that men, if they worship, wish 
to worship one whom they can distinctly conceive as a 
person in relation with themselves, and in whom, as 
the ideal Man, each man can love his race. The 
Great-Being of the Comtist does not realise this wish. 
The organism of which he speaks is not distinct to 
thought, is not a person, is not capable of entering into 
separate relations of affection with individuals. The 
whole thing, while professing to be specially human, 
seems to me specially inhuman. Nor will men, I think, 
9 



1 86 Immorta lity. 

be satisfied to live only in the memory of those to come, 
and to exchange the promise of immortal life (growing 
fuller, wiser, more intense in work and enjoyment of 
growth, more individual and yet less liable to self- 
absorption, every day) for the promise of annihilation 
except so far as their influence and acts remain in the 
continued progress of the race. They will say : 6 All 
you promise me I have already in Christianity, and 
the something more which you do not promise. The 
past and all its human story is far more living to 
me than it is to you. I belong in Christ (who has 
redeemed and is redeeming all men) to all the spirits 
who have been. I am a part, not of a " humanity," all 
the back portions of which are dead, but of a mighty 
army of living men, who, though called dead to us, are 
yet united to us in spirit, and doing human work in 
God, in a world to which I am going. Nor do I only 
belong to the past and present of mankind ; I belong 
in God, who holds eternity within Himself, to all 
the future of mankind. Those yet unborn are living 
in Him, and therefore bound to me. And all the 
beings of the human race,, on earth and in heaven, are 
advancing together — a vast polity, under the education 
of the Lord and King, whose name is Eternal Love. 
Till you can bring your conception up to the level of 
that magnificent conception, we refuse to take it into 
serious consideration. It is a lower thought, and we 
cannot change gold against lead.' 

We believe, then, in the eternal progress of the race 
in God, not only in the immortality of individuals, but in 
the immortality of mankind. It made men fairly object 



Immortality. 



i8 7 



to immortality when it was held to secure to a few con- 
tinuous union with, good, and to the many continuous 
union with evil. It is to this false and cruel view that 
we owe the spread and the strength of secularism. But 
day by day the doctrine of the eternity of evil is being 
driven into its native night before a higher view of the 
nature of God, and a nobler belief in Him as the undying 
righteousness. We are beginning to understand what 
Christ meant when He said, 6 Other sheep I have, which 
are not of this fold : them also I must bring ; and there 
shall be one flock and one shepherd.' It was a e must,' 
an imperative duty which the Saviour felt, and He spoke 
in the name of God, who feels the same as a necessity 
of His relation to us. 

The act of creation lays on us a duty. We bring a 
child into the world, and the absolute imperative of God 
is on us to feed, educate, and love to the end, that to 
which we have given life. We do our best for the child, 
but we will suppose that all goes wrong. We expend our 
love upon him, he rejects it ; we punish, and he hardens 
under punishment and leaves us ; we go after him, and 
he refuses to return ; we give him up to himself for a 
time, and he grows worse, and dies impenitent. But 
if we are of a true human nature, we cannot forget him. 
Our first thought in the other world is our erring son, 
and if we can — and I for one do not doubt it — our one 
effort in the eternal life will be to find him out and 
redeem him to our heart by any sacrifice which love 
can prompt. And even could love not move us, duty 
would call us to^this righteous quest. We must bring 
our wanderer home. 



i88 



Immortality. 



It is so, I firmly believe, with God and men. By the 
very act of creation God has laid upon Himself a ne- 
cessity of redemption. We wander from Him, and He 
punishes us through His spiritual laws ; we reap that 
which we have sown ; we fill our belly with the husks 
which the swine eat. He lets us eat of the fruit of our 
own devices, the day of retribution comes, and our 
pleasures turn to gall, our irritated desires become our 
hell. Lower and lower still we sink, and suffering is 
hard on us, for impenitent man must touch the abyss of 
God's chastising tenderness before pride and self be 
conquered into penitence. But God waits and works ; 
c Them also I must bring 5 speaks the necessity which 
flows from His Fatherhood. All through our deepest 
ruin God's victorious love is opposed to man's reluctant 
hatred and despair ; till at last they, being of the finite 
finite, and of the dead things of the universe dead, are 
shattered to pieces by persistent love ; and the child, 
come to himself, calls out from the depths of a divine 
misery, ' I will arise and go to my Father.' Far off his 
Father sees him, and in triumphant joy receives him : 
6 This my son was dead, and is alive again ; was lost, 
and is found.' It will be thus within eternity, till, in the 
fulness of charity, there shall be at last one flock and one 
shepherd. Most tender and most true of images. Con- 
trast it, in its beauty, with the common notion of the 
future of the race ; that notion which has maddened men 
' into atheism and hatred of immortality — a small flock 
on which all the infinite love of the infinite goodness is 
outpoured, and beyond its fold a howling wilderness 



Immortality. 



189 



of lost and ruined souls, lost and ruined for ever and 
ever, and rained upon by the eternal fires of the ever- 
lasting anger of a vindictive God. It is not so ; that is 
not our God — nor that our heaven, nor that the immor- 
tality for which we cry. God must bring all His creatures 
to Himself. 6 There shall be one flock and one shepherd.' 

As long as the horror of everlasting punishment, or, 
as it may be better expressed, of everlasting evil, 
is preached, secularism will keep alive. Rough-think- 
ing men at this time of the world cannot stand Mani- 
chaeism ; and it is no wonder that they deny God, 
when one of the main things they are told is that 
God either keeps up evil for ever in His universe, or is 
unable to put an end to it. Nor is it any wonder that 
they become unbelievers in Christianity, when a doc- 
trine is linked to Christianity which denies their moral 
instincts, and makes them look on God as the sovereign 
tyrant 5 which forces them to consider the story of re- 
demption as either a weak effort on the part of an in- 
capable God, or a mockery by Him of His creatures on 
the plea of a love which they see as scornful, and a 
justice which they declare to be favouritism. I pro- 
phesy, as this doctrine perishes, the resurrection of the 
working-classes from secularism into faith in the Father 
of men. I foresee a brighter, more joyous, more natural 
Christianity, in the midst of which faith and hope shall 
abide and love which never faileth. Fifty years hence 
we shall all believe in the victorious power of good- 
ness, and the test of orthodoxy shall not be that which I 
once heard applied to a young clergyman, ' Sir, do you 



Immortality, 



believe in the devil ?' It will be this : c Do 3-011 believe 
in God? 5 

Again, the doctrine of immortality was fairly objected 
to when it led men to dwell on their own salvation as 
the first thing, when it promoted the idea of indi- 
vidualism to the loss of the idea of association. To this 
tendency of the doctrine we owe its rejection by the 
positivist religion, for it injured one of the foremost 
doctrines of Comte — that self-love must be systema- 
tically subordinated to social and international sacrifice ; 
that all men and nations ought to be bound together as 
one man. 

The tendency against which there has been this re- 
action is indeed contained in the Christian doctrine : it 
does dwell on and deepen individuality. But it was a 
shameful thing when men tore away this element of the 
doctrine from its brother- element, isolated it, and turned 
it, as a half-truth, into a lie. For the doctrine was united 
on its other side to the frankest sacrifice of the indi- 
vidual to the whole ; nay, it gave men to understand 
that without the largest sacrifice, immortal life could 
not be attained. c Whosoever saveth his life shall lose 
it,' said Christ, 6 and whosoever loseth his life, the same 
shall save it.' He Himself was the Eternal Life because 
He died for the whole world of men. 6 1 could wish 
myself accursed from Christ,' said S. Paul, 'for my 
brethren, my companions' sake.' There was no base 
individualism in that noble speech ; to have the spirit 
which can say it is to have immortal life. 

Nor did Christianity in its relation to immortality 
shut out the element of association. Its original church 



Immortality. 



191 



was cliosen from mankind for the purpose of bringing 
all mankind into it. The heathen world are spoken of 
as apart from it, but only as then apart from it; its 
object was to unite all nations into one, to bring the 
wildest and remotest within its realm. No class was 
left out, no classes existed in its spiritual kingdom; 
9 all were children of God, brothers of one another ; and 
this was their immortal life in the spiritual world, that 
they all lived in and for each other. The images used 
to describe the Christian idea of the Church were 
images of association ; a temple built of living stones — 
a human body, whose head was Christ, from whom ' the 
whole body fitly joined together, and compacted by that 
which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual 
working in the measure of every part, maketh increase 
of the body to the edifying of itself in love.' That is 
not the doctrine of each man for himself, but of each 
for all. The same idea is more fully carried out in 
the "First Epistle to the Corinthians, chap. xii. And I 
must here say that these epistles are not to be taken as 
addressed to a close sect of believers ; they were written 
to all the Corinthian Church, and through them to all 
mankind. Nor were these words spoken to specially 
holy persons, but to the whole body of men, bad or 
good, in that Church; to fanatics, to drunkards who 
scandalised the Supper of the Lord; to defenders of 
incest ; to men fighting with one another and divided 
into religious sects, as well as to the righteous. He 
begins by speaking of the diversities of gifts, and of 
their use in the progressive education of the whole 
body, each ministering that which the other wanted. 



192 



Immortality. 



He goes on to say that 6 all have been baptised into one 
body, whether Jew or Gentile, bond or free ; ' for there 
was no separation of nations or classes. The isolation of 
one from the rest is then condemned, for the body is not 
one member, but many ; nor can any member separate 
himself from the body because he is not as another, 
6 for if the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand # 
I am not of the body, is it not therefore of the body ? ' 
"Nor can any member say that he can live without the 
life of any other member, c The eye cannot say to the 
hand, I have no need of thee — nay, even those mem- 
bers of the body which we think to be less honourable, 
upon these we bestow more abundant honour, and our 
uncomely parts have more abundant comeliness. For 
our comely parts have no need, but God hath tempered 
the body together, having given more abundant honour 
to that part, which lacked; that there should be no 
schism in the body, but that the members should 
have the same care one for another. And whether 
one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; 
or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice 
with it. 5 Mazzini himself could not now, eighteen 
hundred years after, declare more strongly the prin- 
ciple of association ; Comte could not assert more 
largely the doctrine of international interdependence. 
Of course it may be said that these things were 
written solely to the Christian Church. That I deny, 
if the Christian Church is taken to mean any iso- 
lated body at any time in history. They were writ- 
ten to describe the ideal of the Christian Church, 
and that ideal includes all mankind. They describe 



Immortality. 



193 



what ought to be the relation of nations to nations, of 
nations to tribes of every type and colour, of men to 
men all over the world. And they describe what will 
be in the fulness of time, when the body of mankind, 
past, present, and future, shall be wholly finished, and 
the actual be identical with the ideal Man, 

It is this mighty conception which we ought to 
link to our thought of immortality. Without it, the 
desire of eternal life becomes selfish and swiftly falls 
to evil ; with it, it grows into the grandest thought 
which a man can have on earth; with it, immor- 
tality binds itself up with all the noblest speculations 
of patriot, philosopher, and lover of man, with all the 
ideas of our time which have regard to an universal 
and united mankind, giving to them new strength 
and coherence, a fresher hope, an unashamed faith ; 
and leading them beyond the silence and inaction 
of the tomb, where positivist and secularist bury for 
ever the mighty drama of the past of men, bids them 
look forward with a morning light in their eyes to 
the endless beauty and unfailing work of a mankind 
so loved, so deeply loved by us, that when for a moment 
the thought crosses our brain that it could die and make 
no sign, something seems to break within our heart. 



194 



Immortality. 



IMMORTALITY. 

i For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living : for all live unto 
him.' — Luke xx. 38. 

It lias been said by the author of the 6 History of 
Eationalisni ' that 6 the discoveries of modern science 
form a habit of mind which is carried far beyond the 
limits of physics.' 

Nowhere is this more true than in the scornful doubt 
with which some natural philosophers meet the belief 
in immortality, or in the bold denial which they give 
it. It is not long ago since I heard a geologist say, 
6 As a body we have given up the belief in immortality.' 
It may be worth while to-day to suggest, first, a cause 
for this wide-spread surrender of an old belief among 
the men who pursue physical science ; secondly, to look 
into the reason they give for their denial, and to see 
if that reason be reasonable ; and, thirdly, to suggest a 
proof of the doctrine. 

1. The cause I believe to be, in the case of many men 
of science, an unequal development of their nature ; in 
other words, a want- of uniform culture. They give up 
their whole life and all its energy to the study of 
physical phenomena. In these phenomena they find 
nothing spiritual. The strata of an ocean-bed tell them 



Immortality. 



195 



nothing, in their vast succession of life and death, of the 
eternal continuance of the individual. The combinations 
of the elements do not speak of the union of the soul 
with the Eternal Soul of God, and in the convolutions 
of the brain and the interweaving of the nerves they 
will not discover faith, or love, or reverence ; or, not 
being able to deny their existence, they say that they 
dissolve with the nerve matter of which they are modes 
of motion. Not only do they study nothing but these 
things, but they put aside any suggestions of spiritual 
feeling which may come to them in their work as dis- 
turbing elements, as dimming the c dry light ' in which 
they toil. It is no wonder, then, that their spiritual 
faculty becomes dwarfed or paralysed, till, not finding 
its motions in themselves, they are ready to deny their 
existence elsewhere. On the other hand, their peculiar 
nabit of mind becomes abnormally developed, and even 
their imagination is only used in one direction. They are 
like men who should sit all their life in a chair and 
exercise their arms violently. Their arms become 
immensely strong, their legs so feeble that they cannot 
walk. One would not be surprised to hear these persons 
say, ' On the whole, as a body, we have given up any 
belief in walking being either pleasant or intended for 
the human race/ The answer is, ( You are no judge till 
you have recovered the use of your legs.' 

Nor is one in the least surprised by a similar assertion 
on the part of some natural philosophers with regard 
to immortality. Given the previous habit of mind and 
work, what else but unbelief could ensue ? Only we can 
scarcely refrain a smile when the assertion is made 



Immortality. 



with a certain Pharisaic air, 6 Nature, I thank thee, I am 
not led away by superstition or feeling, even as these 
Christians,' and the only possible answer is a smile, such 
as the natural philosopher would greet a religious man 
with, who had as much neglected his intellect and its 
exercise as the denier of immortality has neglected his 
spirit and its exercise, and who should say, as if it settled 
the whole question, 6 On the whole we have ceased to 
believe in the truth of the theory of gravitation.' 

But again, as there are some who have lost the use of 
the religious powers through neglect of them, so there 
are others in whom the religious powers seem wholly 
wanting. They seem to be born with a radical defect 
in their nature, and they can no more see the truth or 
the necessity of immortality than some who are colour 
blind can see the beauty or the use of colour. None 
are more upright than this class of scientific men ; they 
love truth and pursue after it in physics without one 
backward step. But they cannot understand the things 
of the spirit, for these are naturally foolishness to 
them. 

I can see the use, almost the necessity, of this. 
Nature has to be ruthlessly examined, forced step by 
step to yield her secrets. The good of the race demands 
that 1 a certain amount of this work should be done by 
men who are not disturbed by the speculations or the 
passions of the spirit, and though there are many who 
unite with ease the realms of faith and of experiment 
under one government, yet there are a few whose work 
is needed in physics and who would do but little 
therein if they were called on to contend also in the 



Immortality. 



197 



world of the spirit. These, I think, are so far sacrificed 
in this life for the good of the whole; allowed to remain 
imperfect men that they may do their own special work 
in a perfect manner. And we accept their work with 
gratitude, and say to ourselves when we regret their 
want, c God has plenty of time to finish the education 
of His labourers ; that which is deficient here will be 
added hereafter. 5 But at the' same time, while we 
recognise the excellent work of these philosophers in 
their own sphere, we ask of them not to force upon us 
the results of their blindness in another region. If a 
man cannot see red, we do not let him impose on us 
the statement that red is not to be seen, even though 
he may be a perfect musician. If a man cannot conceive 
immortality, we do not let him impose on us the state- 
ment that immortality is a vain dream, even though 
he may be a natural philosopher of the first rank. We 
are bound to say to the one, As a musician we accept 
your criticisms ; as a judge of colour you are of no value ; 
and to the other, As a natural philosopher we bow to 
your conclusions ; as a judge of the truth or falsehood 
of immortality your opinion is worthless. 

Again, in no way is the habit of mind of which we are 
speaking carried further than in the saying of some phy- 
siologists that all thought and feeling are inseparably 
bound up with physical form, with nervous centres and 
the rest; — that form makes mind, and therefore that 
mind, feeling, memory, and the desires, the pain, and 
the joy of that which we call the spirit, perish with 
the dissolution of the machine of which they are 
part. I have just as good a right to start from the 



Immortality. 



other side, and to say that thought makes form ; — nay, 
I have even more right, for by a strict process of 
reasoning one may fairly arrive at the statement that 
our own frame and the whole material universe .is 
the product of our own thought. I do not say 
that I know this, nor assert that mind makes form, 
but it is just as probable as, and even more pro- 
bable, than the opposite assertion. Both statements 
are incapable of sufficient proof. Professor Huxley 
says that ' when men begin to talk about there being 
nothing else in the universe but matter and force and 
necessary laws, he declines to follow them and equally 
when men say that there is nothing else in the universe 
but thought or will or consciousness, we should decline 
to follow them. The latter is far more possible than 
the other; I am myself inclined to believe it, but I do 
not know it. All we know with relation to our body 
and mind is, that certain physical changes take place 
simultaneously with, every thought and feeling. But no 
knowledge of the structure of the brain or nerves can 
show us the connecting link between the two, or enable 
us to say that physical motion is thought or thought 
physical motion. 6 The passage from the physics of the 
brain-/ says Dr. Tyndall, 6 to the corresponding facts of 
consciousness is unthinkable. Granted that a definite 
thought and the definite molecular action in the brain 
occur simultaneously, we do not possess the intellectual 
organ, nor apparently any rudiment of it, which, could 
enable us to pass by a process of reasoning from the one 
phenomenon to the other. They appear together, we 
knownotwhy.' There is no proof, then, that consciousness 



Immortality. 



199 



is inseparably connected with the physical frame, and 
therefore no proof that it perishes with it. The truth, 
then, of the doctrine of immortality remains, considered 
from the intellectual point of view, an open question, 
and to daringly assert that it is untrue is ridiculous in 
the mouth of a sensible man. 

I may say here, in a parenthesis, that Christianity by 
no means denies that thought and form in man are 
closely connected one with the other. On the contrary, 
the doctrine of the resurrection seems to imply thattha 
human consciousness needs form in order to be conscious 
of itself, for it allots a body to the soul. It does not say, 
as some have vainly fabled, that the body* we place in 
the earth and whose elements pass into the earth, is 
raised again : it does say that God gives a spiritual 
body to the soul, whatever that may mean. It throws 
the matter on the omnipotence of God, and if we believe 
in God at all, that a new form should knit itself to a 
mind and spirit which have become personal through 
the memories and work of a human life is no more 
incredible than that they should have been originally 
knit together. 

Moreover, should it turn out to be true that there is 
nothing actually existing but thought, and that our 
present bodies are only the product of our power of 
presenting to ourselves our own conceptions — then, 
supposing that our personal order of thought continues 
after that which we call death, it will weave out of its 
consciousness, under changed conditions, a new vehicle 
for itself, and for ever appear to itself and others to be 
connected with form. 



200 



Immortality. 



But to return to our argument. The natural philo- 
sopher who may allow the possibility of immortality 
will at the same time refuse to consider it as a practical 
question, because, before any intellectual proof can 
be given of it, a spiritual world must be assumed, and 
he refuses to believe without proof in the existence of 
such a world. He takes nothing for granted, he will 
have faith in nothing which cannot be proved to the 
satisfaction of the understanding. 

Now, I want to try and give some reply to this. I 
will not assume, as will be seen, a spiritual world. I 
will only begin with the assumption of the reality of 
a command,* outside of our thought, which bids us do 
what is right, and supposes that we know what is right. 
But, even this is an act of faith, and to that our natural 
philosopher objects in any shape. 

Well, it seems to me that precisely the same diffi- 
culty which he alleges against the consideration of 
immortality may be alleged against himself. He too 
must begin with an act of faith, and without that be- 
ginning he can know nothing at all about the phy- 
sical world. That he does know something about it 
is plain. How did he win that knowledge ? He would 
say, by deductive and inductive reasoning, accompanied 
by experiment. I do not contradict him, but I say that 
he has left out one of the factors of the answer, and a 
very important one : he has left out the act of faith 
with which he started. He willed, by an impulse within 
himself, for which his educated reason can give no proof, 
to believe in the existence of a physical world. And with- 
out that act of faith he could, by any and every process 



Immortality. 



201 



of reasoning, have only arrived at the knowledge that he 
knew nothing at all. It is not difficult to make this 
clear. By the creation of theories which he afterwards 
proved trne through their explanation of all the pheno- 
mena within their several spheres, by long experimental 
arguments conducted from fact to fact, he at last arrived, 
step after step, at the conception of one thing outside 
himself by which all things are, and of which all things 
a,re forms, and he calls this, Force — the constant force 
of the universe. And having thus reduced all things 
to one expression, he may think that he knows all 
things, or is in the sure way of knowing them. I do 
not say that he is not ; but I do say that he assumes 
without proof, and by faith, that there is this thing 
outside of his thought — this Force, which is the phy- 
sical universe. For, without assuming that, what hap- 
pens as he goes on thinking ? He will go back and say 
to himself, c Just as I questioned whether red or blue 
had any real existence, and found that they had none, 
being only the result produced in my brain by sensations 
caused in the eye by waves of light of different lengths — 
and just as when I asked myself whether light had any 
real existence as light, and found on enquiry that it was 
only a mode of motion, a form of force, which was light 
to me because my eye had certain atomic arrangements, 
but which might be electricity to me, if the atoms 
of my eye were differently arranged — -so now I ask 
whether force itself has any real existence apart from 
my thought of it, and therefore whether there be a 
physical universe at all. And, led by reasoning alone, 
I am forced to say that it has not, that there is nothing 



202 



Immortality. 



which I have not first thought, that I can have no 
thought without having first thought it. By reasoning 
alone, I come to the conclusion that the whole physical 
universe is but a picture which my own thought 
presents to itself, and therefore that I know nothing 
about it as it really is, if it is — for even with regard to 
my own thought I cannot say whether I really think 
or only think that I think. I have reached a point at 
which all certainty disappears. I only know that I 
know nothing.' 

But when we have arrived at this point, and absolutely 
discredited all existence, even our own — for the argu- 
ment may be pushed to that — the absurdity of the con- 
clusion tells us that there is something wrong in our 
method of reasoning, that some factor has been left out. 

Our conclusion is that we know nothing, and the 
understanding, working alone, brings us to that. But 
one man will say, 6 The fact is, that I do know something 
about the world of nature.' c Well,' I reply, c look back 
and you will find that you either began with an act of 
faith in the reality of the physical universe, or that you 
put in that act of faith in the course of your argu- 
ment.' To another, who allows that his reasoning has 
led him to the conclusion that he can say nothing cer- 
tain about physical existence, we reply, 6 "No, you never 
can know, till you have resolved to add the factor of 
faith in an outward world to your argument.' 

We must begin our reasoning by an act of faith in 
the existence of a physical world, real at least to us, 
practically independent of us; and it is this act of 
faith which gives consistence to the whole fabric of our 



Immortality. 



203 



physical knowledge, makes it useful, keeps up our work, 
and saves us from yielding to the conclusion to which we 
are driven by the work of the reasoning faculty alone. 
It is the foundation-stone on which the whole of natural 
science is built. 

An unknown impulse in our constitution, the origin 
of which we cannot trace, determines our will — in spite 
of our educated reason — to believe in a physical world. 
And that is as much and as absolute an act of faith as 
that whereby we believe in God or in the reality of 
duty, two things which are one, and which together 
infer immortality. When the man of science, then, 
says to me, c I refuse to consider immortality, it sets 
out with an act of faith,' I reply, ' Tou might as well 
refuse to consider the physical motions of the universe, 
for to do so demands that you should first believe in a 
physical universe, a belief for which you can give no 
proof at all, till you have believed it.' 

And now to apply this to the matter in. hand — to the 
question of the proof of immortality. Taking the 
understanding alone as our guide, and believing 
nothing which cannot be made plain to reasoning, we 
arrive in the spiritual region at a conclusion similar to 
that which we found in the region of physics — at a 
knowledge only that we know nothing of duty, immor- 
tality, or God. We ask and ask again, and the more 
we ask the more sceptical we become. This or that 
may be or may not be : I know nothing at all. And 
this is misery to an earnest man. 

But as we find that the natural philosopher begins 
by willing to believe that there is a physical world 



204 



Immortality. 



to him, so now in this other region we ash ourselves 
whether there is nothing in us which claims our faith, 
and for which we can bring no proof. Is there any- 
thing in our consciousness which is independent of our 
thought? And as we listen we hear a voice which 
says, c You were not born only to know, but far more to 
act ; and not to know and through knowledge to act, 
but to act and through action to know.' We have an 
impulse to moral activity which we feel is one with our 
existence, and this impulse seems to be originally 
beyond all knowledge, to transcend the realm of the 
understanding, to be, not anything we think, but 
the ground of all. our thinking. And we seem to know 
immediately and without any proof — by a different kind 
of knowledge, therefore, than that which we gain from 
reasoning — that we must obey this impulse or fall into 
nothingness. If we take up our old habit and submit 
this inner voice to the questions of the understanding, 
we are forced to ask if we really feel this impulse or 
only think we feel it, and speculation suggests that the 
impulse may be only the thought of a thought which 
our consciousness presents to us, and that if we act 
upon it we cannot know whether we really act or only 
seem to ourselves to act. Tenfold darkness of doubt 
surrounds us then, and our life becomes like a dream 
within a dream. Therefore, in despair, we make a 
bold step, and casting away those enquiries which led us 
to the abyss of nothingness, we resolve with all our 
will to believe that this impulse to moral action is abso- 
lutely a real impulse and to obey it as the true calling 
of our life. We set aside the understanding at this 



Immortality. 



205 



point, and we call faith, to our side. Immediately, we 
know not how, we are convinced that right is a reality, 
and that we can do what is right and that we shall find 
our true and only life in doing it. We are convinced 
of this through faith, and our faith arises not from a 
series of proofs offered by the understanding, but from 
our having freely willed to believe in duty, that is, from 
the whole set of our inward character. 

And now, having by faith found this clear starting- 
point, that we are bound to act according to conscience, 
what follows ? The same voice which tells us that we 
must act rightly, tells us also, and that necessarily, 
that our actions will have a result in the future, and 
as our will and action are conceived of ds right, the 
conception at once arises of a better world in which our 
will and acts shall have their due value. We neces- 
sarily look forward to and live in a nobler world. 
Where is, then, this nobler world ? The religious in- 
fidel may accept so far our argument, but he will 
say that this world to which we look forward is to be 
found not in any spiritual world but in a future human 
world, when man has subdued the forces of the uni- 
verse so that they spoil his work no longer, when he 
has, by the long effort of those who have been faithful 
to the cause of freedom and right, produced a perfect 
state in which each shall love his neighbour, and each 
nation love its neighbour nation, as himself. This is 
the nobler world to which our actions and will aspire, 
and in it are their results. Neither immortality nor 
a spiritual world need here be inferred from the argu- 
ment. 



2C>6 



Immortality. 



But, granting that mankind will reach this perfect 
state, what is to happen then ? There will be nothing 
more to do, nothing to aspire to left, nothing more to 
know. Will action then, and aspiration die, and 
curiosity fail for food ? If so, men will cease to be men, 
mankind will stagnate in its place, or will weep itself 
to death, for it will have no more worlds to conquer. 
Such is the necessary result of this theory without the 
addition of immortal life— and to this miserable end 
we can quietly look forward, for this we can work with 
energy and patience ! When we have made the race 
perfect, we have most utterly ruined the race. It seems 
an intolerable conclusion and an absurd one, and there 
is no way out of it but either the supposition of the 
annihilation of mankind which renders our will to 
do right and the effects we inevitably annex to it ridi- 
culous in our eyes ; or the suppositipn that there is 
another world where the race goes on under new condi- 
tions, to do new work and win new knowledge, where 
the will to do right has its highest and most sure 
results. 

Moreover, our righteous will has but few results in 
this world. There are a thousand thoughts which 
it determines, a thousand feelings it impels, which 
never pass beyond our inner life. The steady volition 
towards good of a long life has little result on this 
earth. Many of the good things we succeed in putting 
into action miserably fail for want of prudence, or even 
produce evil in this world. Where, then, are the results 
of these things ? where does the will act ? where are 
the broken lines, the inner life, completed P If nowhere, 



Immortality. 



207 



and plainly it is not here, then half of our being is 
made up of broken ends of thread. . 

We are driven therefore to think that the nobler 
world in which all good action has its own good results, 
in which our will (determined towards right) serves 
always a noble purpose, is another and a higher world 
than this,- of which we and all our brother-men are 
citizens. In this world our will has power when we 
will to do right ; it sets on foot endless results. In 
this world, which must be spiritual, because our will is 
spiritual, we live and move and have our being now, as 
really, nay more really, than we live and move in the 
physical world by our outward acts, and when we die 
we do not enter a world of which we have had no 
experience, but in a more complete manner, as free 
from earthly limitations, into a world in which we have 
lived already. 

We are forced, then, by feeling that our virtuous 
will must have results, and by the fact that it has only 
a small number of results in this world, to believe in a 
spiritual world in which the will, being itself spiritual, 
finds its true ends fulfilled. That is the first step in 
the argument for immortality, after the act of faith of 
which I spoke has been freely chosen by the will. 

The second step carries us on to the truth of Im- 
mortality. 

When I conceive of my will to do right having 
necessary results in a spiritual world, I conceive of a 
law as ruling in that world. If the results must be, 
there must be a law by which they are necessary. To 
that law I am connected by moral obedience, and 



208 



Immortality. 



because it annexes fixed results to virtuous volition in 
me and in all men, it is above and beyond our wills. 
In it all our finite wills are held, and to it they all are 
subject. But since the world in which this law is, is 
not the world of sense, but a spiritual world in which 
will acts, the law of that- world cannot be like that 
which we call a law here, a mere expression of antece- 
dents and sequences, a mere statement of the way in 
which things are ; it must be a living law ; it must be 
self-active reason ; it must be a will. 

And it is a Will — the Will from whom all human 
wills have flowed, to which all human wills are related, 
in whom all human wills have being ; the only self- 
existent, the only unchangeable, the only infinite Will, 
of whom and by whom and through whom are all things 
— God invisible, eternal, absolute, to whom be glory for 
ever and ever. The voice I hear in my heart, and to 
which I willed to give obedience, and whose reality I 
believed at first, I know now was His voice. My will, 
which determined to obey that voice, was urged thereto 
by this infinite Will. My will is related to Him, and in 
Him must have results in the whole spiritual world 
which exists in Him and by Him. And this which is 
true of me is true of all my fellow-men. As the will of 
each is contained and sustained by Him, and has its 
own special results in Him, He becomes the spiritual 
bond of union which unites me to all the race ; we 
all together share our life in Him. And because we 
share in His Being and He is eternal and imperishable, 
we also know, at last, that we are eternal and imperish- 
able — and that, for the certainty of which our soul has 



Immortality, 



209 



longed and cried, is a reality. We are immortal. 
Death, as we call it, may touch our sensible vesture, but 
it is only a vesture which decays. Our being goes on in 
another life, for we live in His Life, and our true world 
is not this world. £ We look for a city which hath 
foundations.' We abide in Him and He in us, and He 
abides for ever. 

The parallel, in fact, between the two lines of argu- 
ment, is exact. The natural philosopher having put in, 
either at the beginning, or in the process of his work, 
a belief in the existence of Force, which is a belief in 
an outward world, finds that which he was driven to 
assume confirmed at every step of his enquiry. He 
cannot understand a number of facts except on the 
ground that Force is a reality to him, and he leaves 
aside, as unpractical in his work, the question as to 
whether it has only an existence in Thought. His 
theory of Force explains by far the greater part of 
natural phenomena, and is contradicted by none. He 
returns then to his starting-point, and says, ' That which 
I originally believed without proof, is true. Force is 
a real existence.' 

Precisely in the same way we prove that the reality 
of Duty, which we willed to believe — and which, seen 
as we saw it, (not as something developed by the slow 
action of social circumstances, but as a command inde- 
pendent of our own thought and coming to us from 
without,) necessarily inferred a spiritual world, and God, 
and Immortality — is an absolute reality. It and its 
necessary results, which together form our theory of the 
Universe of Spirit, solve the greater part of the moral 
10 : 



2IO 



Immortality. 



and spiritual problems of life, and are not distinctly 
contradicted 'by any. 

But it may be said that the analogy is not exact. 
For though Force or the physical world is proved to 
have a real existence to us, it is not proved to have an 
independent existence, and some scientific men are in 
doubt on that question. All Force, they say, may 
be nothing more than Will — Will-Force. Moreover, 
though the supposition of its existence explains most of 
the phenomena we know, that does not necessarily infer 
that it has any existence independent of Thought. We 
have no right, then, an objector may say, to infer, be- 
cause our theory of the universe of Spirit explains the 
moral and spiritual phenomena of human life and its 
history, the actual existence of Duty, of a spiritual 
world, of God, and of Immortality. We can only infer 
their existence in Thought. 

Only their existence in Thought ! In what else should 
they exist, and what existence can be more absolute ? 
We ask no more. For taking the ground of those 
scientific men who think that Force is Will, they think 
no more than we wish them to think, that there is a 
Will, and therefore a Thought, in whom the Universe is. 
In thinking thus, they grant God, and the real existence 
of all things in Him. In thinking thus, the physical 
world is no less a reality to them, but more. The 
question whether it have independent existence or not 
does not touch their work, nor will their work on that 
account be of less moment for ever and ever, for the 
principles of the order of this apparent world will be 
always the same in any other apparent world, however 



Immortality, 



211 



different from this, for they are fixed in God's Thought. 
We have a right, then, to say that the analogy fits 
accurately. 

We assume, then, a spiritual world, or rather we assume 
the reality of Duty, from which we necessarily infer, 
as I said, a spiritual world ; and when we find that the 
phenomena of the human conseience and spirit can be 
explained on that assumption, we return to our starting- 
point and say, 6 That which we believed without proof, 
is true. There is an imperative beyond our thought 
and independent of our consciousness which we are 
bound to obey. The moment we will to obey it, we are 
conscious that it must have results, and, on further 
thought, that these results can only be fully realised 
in a world in which Will and Thought alone exist, and 
therefore in a spiritual, not a material world. And 
granting these things, our will to do right, and a world 
in which Will and Thought alone exist, we are forced 
to infer One whose Will is absolutely good, and who 
contains in His Will our will, and in His self-active 
Season and Will, which are His personality, our person- 
ality ; One therefore who is Eternal Life, and the life 
of all, the only pure Being, in whom all Being is. And 
lastly, we are driven with joy to feel and know, that if 
Duty, and a spiritual world, and God, be truths, 
Immortality must also be a Truth. If we are insepa- 
rably connected with the Infinite and Eternal Will, we 
must ourselves be, as derived from Him, infinite and 
eternal. 

And now, with this knowledge in our hand, we turn 
to our life, and find it falling into perfect order. We 



2 1 2 Immortality. 



know whence we have come and whither we are going. 
We know the end of all our brother-men and the 
necessary end of all this struggle of Man. Problem 
after problem is solved — difficulty after difficulty 
vanishes away ; and if some things remain obscure, we 
know that we have but to wait, and our key will unlock 
them, when we are able to bear the revelation. Peace 
enters our heart, the peace which comes of certain 
knowledge. We know and rest in the infinite meaning 
of the Saviour's saying : e God is not a God of the 
dead, but of the living : for all live unto him.' 



Immortality. 



213 



IMMORTALITY. 

t For lie is not a God of the dead, but of the living : for all live unto 
him.' — Luke xx. 38. 

"No one can help feeling, at this time of the year, a 
forecasting of decay. The melancholy skies, the naked 
trees, the heavy smell of rotting leaves, the hateful 
atmosphere, tell their own story. And influenced as 
we are through blood and bone by the elements which 
surround us, and by the memories of brighter weather, 
the spring of life relaxes, and our thoughts take the 
colour of decay. 

As it is year after year, is it so for man after man ? 
Time goes on, but past years do not live again. The 
flower-life goes on, but not the same flowers. And 
does mankind go on, but not men ? Have we each our 
spring, our summer, our rich and swiftly miserable 
autumn, our winter of death, and never another spring? 
This is the thought of many at this time. The race 
continues, but the individual perishes. "Death is per- 
sonal annihilation. 

Last Sunday we gave some reasons for the prevalence 
of this thought among natural philosophers ; to-day we 
begin by giving some reasons for its prevalence in 
other classes of society, and pass on to consider the 



214 



Immortality. 



reasonableness or not of annihilation : meaning by 
annihilation not, of course, the destruction of the ele- 
ments of which our body is composed, but the resolu- 
tion into those elements of all that we call thought, 
feeling, will, and self-consciousness. 

The reasons of the prevalence of this opinion vary 
with different types of men and their different lives. 
It arises in some from the intensity of youthful ardour, 
when it has been overstrained. They have been so fall 
of life that they have drawn upon it too much, and 
drained the source dry. Weary, exhausted, yet still 
desirous to find the old enjoyment, they are tossed 
between desire and weakness to fulfil desire, till at last 
the only comfort seems to be to look forward to an 
eternal sleep. c Why should the vital torment of life 
be renewed P ' they ask, forgetting that it is torment 
because life has been misused, not knowing that life is 
vital joy when it is used with temperance. 

It arises in others, and these chiefly business men, 
from the disease of unceasing work. One of the things 
which is acting worst on English society is that a 
number of men have got into that state in which 
recreation is impossible. All the year round, from 
morning to night, they pursue their trade or their 
profession without a single break, except their heavy 
after-dinner sleep. Even in dreams they hunt their 
work, like dogs. This is also a misuse of life. All joy 
is taken out of it, beauty has no place in its foggy 
realm ; even love resolves itself into a dull desire to 
provide for one's children. The world is not their 
oyster which they open, they are the oysters of the 



Immortality. 2 1 5 

world. And when they are deaf and blind to all the 
loveliness and passion and movement of life, what 
wonder if, having become machines, they do not care 
to run on for ever ? 

It arises in the case of a number of cultivated young 
men from the depression of failure. Within the last 
ten years there has been in the universities an 
atmosphere, almost tropical, of refined culture and 
scholarship, and in it a number of intellects and 
imaginations have been forced, till they are, for the 
most part, unfitted to do the rough work of the world. 
Educated, then, up to the point at which they fully 
comprehend aud passionately feel the great things 
which men possessing genius have done, it seems to 
them, by a very common instinct, that they can either 
do the same or at least that they have a right to try. 
Hence we have the deluge of second and third-rate 
painters, poets, novelists, critics, and the rest, with 
which England is now overspread. They begin with 
hope and joy, and after a little deserved applause for 
the passim; pleasure they have given, mankind, whose 
judgment soon gets right, drops them, and they feel 
with bitterness that though they have won something, 
it is not their ideal, and moreover, that they can never 
reach their ideal. The applause does not deceive 
them, they are too well educated not to see, when the 
first excitement of production is over and they look at 
the work to which they have given their best powers, 
that they have failed. Disgust of life ensues, a kind of 
passionate hatred of themselves. In that atmosphere 
no good work can be done, and if they try again the 



2l6 



Immortality. 



inspiration which they had abandons them — it was 
founded on ignorance of the extent of their powers, 
knowledge has dispersed it : the failure is worse than 
before. But all this sort of work has unfitted them for 
ruder and more practical work. After riding on 
Pegasus they cannot get into the traces and pull at the 
common chariot of the work of the world. They cease 
to act, they bury themselves in their learned and 
artistic leisure, and all vivid life is over. The bitter- 
ness of failure leads them to utter carelessness of a life 
to come. "Why should they renew the web which will 
crack from side to side again ? — and the inaction in 
which they live takes away the desire to live again, for 
it takes away the food of life. 

Moreover, among persons of this educated type the 
same thing holds good, as in the case of the scientific 
man who pursues nothing else but science. Devotion 
to art or to criticism alone, developes the faculties used 
to a strength out of all proportion to the rest. Not 
only are the spiritual powers dwindled to a thread for 
want of use, so that immortal life is a pretty dream, but 
the faculties used, being unbalanced by other important 
powers of our nature, are not capable of forming a just 
judgment. Criticism, in discussing matters such as the 
evidence for immortality, discusses it as it would the 
evidence for the existence of an early and unimportant 
myth. It begins by supposing it is not true ; it leaves 
out all the spiritual phenomena which, in the history of 
the human heart, have accompanied faith in it ; it treats 
a question which belongs, by the hypothesis, to the 
realm of intellect and the spirit, as if. it were a question 



Immortality \ 



217 



of the pure intellect alone. On the face of it, nothing* 
can be more absurd — as absurd as the late discussion into 
which one of our philosophers enters, with regard to a 
mother's love for a child, on physiological grounds alone. 
It is plain in this" case that the critical powers have 
become so abnormally developed as to vitiate the purity 
of judgment. 

On the other hand, the mere aesthetic life tends equally 
to a belief in annihilation. A somewhat stern and 
energetic manliness is needed in the character of a 
highly educated man before he can look forward with 
joy to living for ever. Increase of knowledge and 
increased sensitiveness of feeling increase the pain of 
living, and though they also increase its joy, yet we 
begin to fear joy, for we know the reaction which 
follows it. ' Can we bear,' we ask, 6 going on with this 
struggle for ever ? ' Yes, we can;, but only when we are 
possessed by the noblest and the strongest ideas, when 
, we enter into the struggle as men who are resolved not 
to retreat a single step. Slowly, then, as we grow 
through long battle into veteran warriors, we feel, 
not the languid pleasure in beauty, but the glorious 
joy of the war for right: and to live for ever becomes 
the first desire of life, for we know that it means life 
in union with eternal Goodness, Truth, and Love. 

This sort of manliness the exclusively sesthetic life 
does not cherish but enfeebles. It produces a soft, 
rather mournful, habit of mind : it unnerves the more 
active powers, it makes men shrink from the clash of 
life; its devotion to beauty, for beauty's sake alone, 
blurs the sharpness of the lines which divide right and 



218 Immortality. 

wrong : everything which charms the senses, provided 
the charm be a delicate one, is lovely, and whether it is 
morally lovely or not is a secondary consideration. 
Pain, therefore, disease, strong effort, the struggle of 
doubt, the labour to find answers to great problems, 
such as this of immortality, become bitter and distress- 
ful; and in absolute seeking after and finding of the 
beautiful here, in exquisite enjoyment of it when found, 
and in exquisite regret of it when it can be no more 
enjoyed, all hope, nay, all possibility of enjoying 
another life than the present, passes away, and life 
becomes in youth a passionate desire to get all the 
joy and beauty possible before old age comes, and in 
old age a wailing memory of past delight, and a 
sorrowful waiting in as much quiet as possible for the 
everlasting sleep. 'Why enter another world? JSTo 
other world can be lovelier that this ; and if I may not 
have this, I do not care for another. 5 

The reasons why many working-men reject immor- 
tality I have spoken of elsewhere, but there is one rea- 
son common to them and to many educated men. It is 
that we are living in a revolutionary period of thought, 
and the very fact that any opinion is an old one is enough 
to subject it to attack. Now, in the general revolt against 
things accredited by custom, not only is the orthodox 
faith involved, but also beliefs which, though included in 
Christianity, are older than it. Among these is the belief 
in immortality. We are doubting now the doctrine that 
the ancient Persian, Hindoo, and Hebrew clung to, that 
Cicero and Plato rejoiced in holding, that the Maho- 
metan does not dream of denying. It seems as if on 



Immortality. 



219 



this subject the whole world were going back into the 
old savage, or into even a less noble condition, for I 
suppose no man in hours of sober judgment has any 
doubt as to the nobleness of the idea of immortality, 
and the degradation involved in the idea of annihi- 
lation. But the truth is that a vast deal of the denial 
of the former among the working-classes and among 
the young men*and women of the upper classes is not 
owing to any thought being expended on the subject, 
but simply to the revolutionary impulse in them. ' The 
thing is old, let us get rid of it. The conservative 
feeling supports it; everything which conservatism 
supports we attack : let us have something new.' And 
it is not unamusing — if we put the religious feeling 
about it aside — to watch the self-conscious audacity 
with which people try to awake one's astonishment, and 
really awake one's pity, by airing in society their faith 
in annihilation, as if to believe in it were not intel- 
lectually and morally a miserable business. 

One would despair of the progress of mankind if one 
thought that this would last. But revolutionary periods 
end by finding a new channel for their waters, and 
though the exhausted ideas of the past perish in the 
whirlpool, the noble ideas live and flow on with the 
new waters. We are now in a kind of backwater of 
the great river of Progress, and spinning round and 
round in a confusion of eddies and efforts to get on. 
When we have found our fresh thoughts and got them 
clear, we shall get out of the backwater with a rush, 
and stream on in that which I like better than revolu- 
tion — steady movement, aware of itself, to distinctly 



220 



Immortality. 



recognised ends. But at present everyone is naturally 
dissatisfied with the want of purpose, of clear aims, of 
any coherent ideas in social, political, religious, and 
artistic life. And the dissatisfaction shows itself chiefly 
in all matters which belong to the realm of art, for 
in art one always finds the more subtile aspects of any 
society reflected. Our more modern poets and painters 
find nothing calm or perfect enough in modern life to 
represent. They go back out of the present to the 
past ; they tell us stories and paint us scenes from the 
old Greek and Mediseval life. They try to recover the 
dead motives of a dead life, and a whole school has 
sprung up, both in poetry and on canvass, which possesses 
much charm, but which is essentially mournful and 
retrograde, which smells of musk and ambergris, whose 
passion is more that of exhausted feeling trying by 
morbid means to sting itself into joy than the frank 
and healthy passion of youth, whose notes are not 
native to English soil, and whose work does not smack 
of the fresh air, nor seem done face to face with na- 
ture, but smells of scented rooms, lit up with artificial 
light. 

Our art has been driven from the present to the past, 
and those who enjoy and love it, naturally cease to feel 
interest in the future; the whole tone of feeling it 
encourages tends to lessen the care for and the belief in 
a life to come. 

But this cannot last; the present is always too strong 
for the past, and art, and philosophy, and literature, 
and with them educated society, will emerge from this 
backwater when modern life finds clear aims, and 



Immortality. 2 2 1 

flow on in new channels. Active life in the present will 
then produce art and literature to represent it, and the 
interest in the present will make the future so interest- 
ing, that the tendency to believe in immortality will 
take to itself fresh life. By that time Christianity — 
I mean our present form of it, which is also in this 
revolutionary stage of confusion, changing old opinions 
for new — will also have refitted itself to the higher 

S3 

thoughts and wants of men; and its doctrine of immor- 
tality, freed from the low ideas with which it has been 
surrounded by a dying theology, present once more to 
men, longing again to live for ever because they have 
found a vital present, a glorious ideal to which they 
can aspire with joy. 

For, after all, what is at the root of this belief in 
annihilation ? It is that our theology has been for some 
years presenting to us an idea of God wholly inadequate 
to our present intellectual and moral conceptions, and 
an idea of man which we now reject as ignoble, and as 
untrue because ignoble. Not that this idea of God was 
inadequate to past society, or that idea of man ignoble. 
They were then as high as most men could receive, 
though we always find a few who protested against 
them, and rose above the common level. But thought 
on these subjects is now up to that of the higher spirits 
of the past, and theology must rise to the moral and 
intellectual level of the present before immortality can 
be a universal faith again. 

An adequate idea of God, a noble idea of man, these 
are the ideas which, reintroduced into theology, will 
bring back the belief in immortality, for they will render 



222 



Immortality. 



the theory of annihilation intellectually as well as 
morally absurd. 

The common notion of God divides His being from 
the universe and from mankind. It is so afraid of 
being called pantheistic, that it forgets the truth which 
is in pantheism. If nature and mankind are, as a 
whole or in any of their parts, capable of being truly 
severed from God, so that the one runs along like a 
machine which may run down, or that in the other, one 
soul can, by becoming eternally evil, be eternally divided 
from the Godhead, then God cannot be considered 
absolute nor all-comprehending nor all-powerful for 
good, There are points at which His power fails, His 
goodness retires from the field, points at which He is 
forced to struggle, and the possibility of inferring these 
things from the orthodox idea of God is surely incon- 
sistent with the idea of Him which we feel now that we 
ought to possess. It is really less than we can conceive, 
and for us to worship it any longer is idolatry. We 
must have an adequate idea of God, and till we get it 
into theology, a great number of men who think deeply 
will be atheists, and necessarily disbelievers in immor- 
tality. 

Again, owing to this uncultivated notion of a God 
who sits apart, at a distance from us, we are forced 
to assume another great power in the universe. If any 
one of us, or any thing, can have, or retain being, apart 
from Him, then there must be another source of being 
than His. And, practically speaking, that is what is 
held. The artist talks of nature, the philosopher of 
law, the theologian of the devil, and we have a dual 



Immortality. 



223 



government of the world, in which God tends to become 
more and more a remote and misty phantom. 

Now, I say if we believe in a God at all, that the 
only adequate conception of Him which will satisfy 
our intellect and heart alike, is one which conceives 
of Him as the sole self-existing .Being and of every- 
thing and everyone as having Being only in His Being. 
The life of the universe, of matter and spirit, is one life 
— the Life of God infinitely conditioned in and through 
a myriad forms. There is not a shred of the world called 
the world of nature which is not held in Him, and is not, 
indeed, His thought. We all are, only because we are 
in Him and part of His being, our personality held in His 
personality. Do not call this pantheism. It may be 
pantheism, but it is something more than pantheism. 
It is not saying the universe is God, it is saying God is 
the universe and something more than the universe. 
Ifc is the doctrine which S. Paul inferred from the old 
Greek poet : 6 In Him we live, and move, and have our 
being ; as certain also of your own poets have said, For 
we are also His offspring.' It is the doctrine of S. Paul 
himself : 6 Of Him, and by Him, and through Him 
are all things;' and the moment we fully conceive that 
He alone is, and that nothing is which is not He, it 
becomes intellectually absurd that any soul should go 
out as a candle. Once having been, once having had 
consciousness, once having had personality, it is im- 
possible to lose being, consciousness, and personality. 
That which is in God, in eternal Being, cannot perish. 

But it is not intellectually absurd when God's exist- 
ence is denied and to this conclusion men come who 



224 



Immortality. 



think of what they mean by annihilation. They know 
that the denial of immortality irresistibly infers atheism, 
that if there is Eternal Being, those who have issued 
from that Being and have their being in Him must be 
immortal : we cannot think the one without thinking 
the other. And I want those who so lightly talk of 
man dying for ever to clearly understand either that 
they are talking nonsense, if they confess a God, or that 
they are logically driven into atheism. 

For not only is the notion of annihilation of person- 
ality — that is, of our consciousness, will, and character 
— intellectually absurd in face of an adequate intel- 
lectual conception of God, it is also morally absurd in 
face of an adequate moral conception of God. 

But the fact is that it is not morally absurd to many 
of us, because we have no adequate moral conception of 
God. The moral inadequacy of our thought of God is 
chiefly in this, that we accept a teaching which thinks 
of Him as having no duties to His children. We are 
told that He has a Sovereign's right to do what He likes 
with us, and that we have no business to judge as to the 
right and wrong of His actions. 

I deny that at once on the ground already laid down, 
that our being is held in God's being, and therefore that 
what is truth and justice and love to us is the same 
in kind in us as in God, and that it is absurd to think 
otherwise. But as these teachers do think otherwise, 
they go on to infer that things which would seem 
unjust if done by a man are not unjust if done by 
God. We are told that He creates us to damn us, or 
leaves us alone to ruin ourselves, or that He allows us 



Immorta lity. 225 

to be children of the devil, things so absolutely immoral 
in an earthly father, that we are driven either into a 
state of blind submission in which intellect is destroyed 
and the moral sense utterly confused, or into absolute 
revolt, or into a kind of hopeless drifting carelessness 
of the whole matter. And in the last state of mind 
are those who still cling by old custom to belief in 
God and immortality, but who have no real pleasure 
or interest in their belief in whom it produces no 
result. 

Now, such a Want of vital faith is due to a mean 
conception of their own moral nature following on a 
mean conception of God's moral nature. £ He has left 
me to myself/ they say ; 6 nay, more, I am told that 
I am vile and worthless spiritually, that my nature 
is utterly corrupt. If I am so bad/ they go on, 6 why 
should I care what becomes of me ? If my nature is 
corrupt throughout, what is the use of aspiring to be 
better 9 — nay, I do not believe in my aspirations : am I 
not told that they themselves are wicked ? 5 This is the 
way they have argued long ago. Now they have ceased to 
trouble themselves about the matter, but the result of 
the argument remains as an unconscious influence below 
the surface of their life, and the effect is a total loss of 
interest in immortality, amounting to practical disbe- 
lief of it. 

All this is done away with by a true moral concep- 
tion of God in His relation to us, based on the moral 
ideas which we possess ourselves from Him. He has 
sent us forth from Himself, therefore He is bound to 
be, we feel, in the highest conceivable sense a Father 



226 



Immortality. 



to us, and He is our Father. We can never, then, be 
separated from Him, never let alone by Him, never 
shut up by Him in eternal evil. Our Being has come 
direct from His, and is now in His Being, therefore our 
nature can never be utterly vile. Our aspirations are 
His voice in us ; our justice, truth, and love, such as 
they are, are still the same in kind as His. 

He is pure moral Being : therefore — since we cannot 
divide ourselves from Him and since He is bound as a 
Father to educate us — we must reach in the end pure 
moral being. 

It is thus that from an adequate moral conception of 
God we arrive at the second thing I said we wanted 
to restore to us the belief in immortality — an adequate 
conception of man. We are inseparably united to 
pure intellectual and moral Being, and in that union 
we are great, and do great things of the brain and of 
the spirit. 

And now, in conclusion, taking both of these things 
together — the greatness of man in God, and the abso- 
lute morality of God, which we now know is in kind 
the same as ours — let us see if annihilation be not 
morally absurd, if the being of God be granted. 

Of course I shall speak in what follows of good 
men, and it will be said that the argument does not 
prove that the wicked will not be annihilated. But 
I have already spoken of this question in previous 
sermons, and I hold that the destruction of the wicked 
is morally and logically impossible if there be a God 
who is the only self-existing Being, and if He be a 
moral Being. It is a question of redemption beyond 



Immortality. 227 

this earth, but the present argument deals with the 
question as it lies before us in this world. 

No one can deny, who is not prejudiced by the low 
theological view of our nature, that it is capable of 
greatness of character. In every age there have been 
men who have forgotten self for the sake of right and 
truth and for a noble cause, even though the self-forget- 
fulness meant death ; men whose glory shines with the 
serene light of stars in the sky which arches over his- 
tory. Others, too, have been, whose path has lain 
apart from fame, the quiet martyrs of self-surrender, 
who have died to the joys of life for the sake of others' 
joy, or borne in the eloquent silence of resignation bitter 
pain and grief. 

And has all that perished for them ? Has the noble 
effort and the faithful life been in vain for those who 
lived it? Are they only to live in our memory and 
love, but they themselves ' to be blown about the desert 
dust or sealed within the iron hills 5 ? It revolts all 
our moral feeling if we believe in a moral God. Either 
there is no God, whose children we are, "or the denial 
of immortality is absurd. There is nothing between 
atheism and immortality. 

And that infinite thirst of knowledge we possess, that 
power of thought which sweeps us beyond the world of 
sense and time ; that inexhaustible activity of imagina- 
tion by which we create new worlds ; our passionate 
cry for the rest which lies in harmony of nature ; our 
desire for fuller life when life is filled with great thoughts 
and pure and passionate love of man ; that yearning of 
the spirit for freedom from sin and for union with truth \ 



228 



Immortality. 



that ceaseless cry for more light ; our delight in reve- 
rencing something better than ourselves, in ideal ex- 
cellence ; our intense sensibility to beauty and sublimity 
in nature — have these no final cause if God exists ? Didj 
He give us these powers of intellect and heart and 
spirit — powers which draw their fire from the fire of 
His eternal Thought and Will — only to resume them into 
Himself, to lure us oh to work and then to quench our 
light : to make our hopes our hell, our noblest longings 
our deepest misery ; to extinguish our exhaustless 
effort and curiosity in the degradation of an eternal 
sleep ? Did He give us that love of the ideal, that de- 
light in beauty, that tearful interest in His universe, 
only to make the grave and the wretched dust of our 
corruption the vain and miserable end? Has He 
written His scorn on all our aspirations after truth 
and light and holiness ? Does He smile with con- 
temptuous pity when men's hearts go up to Him in 
praise for the freshness and radiance of the spring ? 
It is incredible. Either the atheist is right, or that 
immortality is untrue is absurd. 

Look, too, at our triumph over death. "When decay 
usurps the powers, and memory and life slip from us 
like a dream, it is then that our inner being most often 
rises into beauty and victory. And when the last 
act of the man is the assertion of his immortality, 
does the Lord of Righteousness contradict him in 
contempt ? Is the spirit on the verge of its greatest 
loss at its very noblest moment of gain ? does it reach 
with faithful effort, and thrilled with divine hope, the 
mountain peak, only to topple over the precipice of 



Immortality. 229 

annihilation ? Then those who believe in God are the 
real fools of the world. 

Our sonl swells with reverence and love for those 
who held life as nothing in comparison with truthful- 
ness to right ; our soul is full of a sad condemnation of 
those who prefer to live when life is infamous ; and yet 
if annihilation be true, God despises the nobility which 
we revere, and tacitly approves the infamy which we 
condemn. But this is incredible if we conceive of God 
as moral : it is hideous. Either, then, there is no God 
or annihilation is false. 

Finally, it is true of a noble human life that it 
finds its highest enjoyment in the consciousness of 
progress. Our times of greatest pleasure are when 
we have won some higher peak of difficulty, trodden 
under foot some evil, refused some pleasant tempta- 
tion for truth's sake, been swept out of our narrow 
self by love, and felt day by day, in such high labours, 
so sure a growth of moral strength within us, that we 
cannot conceive of an end of growth. 

And when all that is most vigorous within us, does 
God — pure moral Being — does God say No ? Is that 
insatiable delight in progress given to the insect of an 
hour? Does there seem to be a Spirit who leads us 
through life, conquering the years in us, redeeming us 
from all evil, bringing in us calm out of sorrow, faith 
out of doubt, strength out of trial ; and when He has 
made us great of spirit like Himself, does He bury all 
that wealth of heart in nothingness ? 

What incredible thing is this ? — only credible if there 
be no God. 



230 



{ Melencolia.' 



melencolia: 

1 For in niuch wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledgo 
increaseth sorrow.' — Eccles. i. 18. 

The first impulse of many, on hearing this text, would 
be to give it a blunt contradiction. In their opinion, 
to increase knowledge is to increase pleasure, and their 
opinion is true. The pleasure of a thousand associations 
' which wake pity, and kindle enthusiasm, and adorn the 
meanest place in which a great action has been done, 
is the reward of the historian's knowledge. The pleasure 
of discovery, of confirming theory by fact, of recreating 
the past earth and peopling its plains with life — if these 
accompany the common walk of one who knows even a 
little of natural philosophy, what deeper pleasures are 
his lot whose extensive knowledge can correlate the 
facts of many different spheres of science, and so harmo- 
nise the universe ? 

The pleasure of recognising the truth in the crea- 
tions of great poets, of seeing into the secret springs 
of human action; of a fine and subtile tolerance, of 
playing on the hearts of men, of making society musical 
by bringing out of different temperaments accordant 
tones ; of giving sympathy and directing help aright 
— these are the delights which come of a fine knowledge 



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^et toil and burden, cross an,* . 
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lgl§C 



' Melencolia! 



231 



of the human heart. In every region of man's activity, 
he that increaseth knowledge increaseth pleasure. 

But is this the whole account of the matter ? We 
may contradict the test as we please, but we do not in 
reality contradict it by asserting its opposite ; we only 
complete it by asserting its other half. Both statements 
are half-truths. The whole truth of the thing is only 
found in the assertion of both. He that increaseth 
knowledge increaseth pleasure, and — increaseth sorrow. 

Tor in this world, pleasure and sorrow are two sisters 
who never live very far apart. Every pleasure which 
comes to the surface of the lake of life has had its 
own sorrow born with it in the depths below. Sooner 
or later, it too will come to the surface, and the blood- 
red lily of pain will replace the sunny lily of pleasure. 

Knowledge and toil are the sources of joy, but they 
are also the sources of sorrow. 

This is what Albert Diirer saw and engraved in his 
subtile print of 6 Melencolia.' All of you are probably 
acquainted with it, and I take it with the passage in 
Ecclesiastes as my text, for the key-note of the whole 
is, he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. 

This would be especially true, in the artist's time, of 
those who were attempting to penetrate into the secrets 
of the physical world. For the true methods of scien- 
tific investigation had not been found ; and though the 
alchemist and the natural philosopher, whose instruments 
are seen in the engraving, lit upon discoveries which 
seemed to open vistas of knowledge, they could not 
apply them, much less generalise them. At the end of a 
long life of work, they were no further than before ; 



232 



* Melencolia! 



the knowledge they had won served only to tantalise 
them. 

The opening soliloquy of the great German poem may 
well express the intolerable melancholy which seized on 
all physical students of that time — the bitter conscious- 
ness of their fruitless work, their hopeless incapacity 
to know. 

We are freed from that grief, for we are consciously 
advancing, having found true methods. But Durer 
must have met many who had worn out their life, and 
sometimes their brain, in the service of the crucible. 
But the same profound pain besets us in the science of 
metaphysics and of theology, and for the same reason — 
the want of true methods. Many a thinker who has 
spent life in passionate labour to solve the problems of 
the soul, is seized, when the energy of the brain begins 
to fail, with the biting sorrow which is born of fruitless 
labour. 

But the sorrow which we describe is never, when 
the man is true, a base, but a noble one. And so, 
Diirer's lonely figure, the genius of the labour and 
knowledge of the earth, is crowned with the laurel and 
winged with the mighty pens of thought and imagina- 
tion. 

JSTor is this sorrow felt at all times, but at intervals 
when labour and thought are, for a time, forgotten, and 
in a moment of pause unconscious meditation sets in. 
It is the attitude of arrested thought in which the seated 
figure reposes, her cheek upon her hand, her compass 
idle, her book unread, her instruments scattered idly at 
her feet, her keys unused, her very wolf-hound, sym- 



1 Melencolia? • 233 



pathising with, lier mood in his own way, fast asleep ; 
her eyes gazing into the void. 

Su^h. moments are not unknown to us, when the pen 
drops, or the spade falls from the hand, or the analysis 
is forgotten, and in an instant we float away upon that 
vague ocean of questioning thought whose depths no 
sounding-line of ours has ever fathomed. Everyone 
knows that the atmosphere of these pauses is that of a 
noble melancholy. 

Now, what, in the artist's imagination, were the 
subtile sadnesses which characterised such a moment ? 
We may guess at them by the symbols which, he places 
round his figure. But they are many : on one only 
and what it suggests we speak to-day. Diirer has ex- 
pressed the one certainty in this world of uncertainty, 
the demonstrative certainty of the science of numbers, 
in the four-square tablet fixed above the winged genius 
in the wall of the house, all the sixteen squares of which 
contain a number. Whether one adds up these num- 
bers horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, they have the 
same result. 

Now the melancholy which arises from the vague 
answers which we -can only suggest to many of our 
deepest questions is made greater by the clear answers 
which our questions receive in science. Distinctness 
in one sphere seems to suggest with a mocking irony 
that distinctness might be reached in all, if we had 
power. We have wings then, but we have the misery 
of knowing that they are not strong enough. The more 
we know, the greater becomes the number of things we 
have to harmonise, the deeper our conviction that we 
11 



234 



* Melencolia! 



see through a glass, darkly. One certainty makes all 
our uncertainties more painful, but it makes tenfold 
more painful the uncertainties of the world of the spirit. 
The things of the profoundest interest, the existence of 
God and what is His relation to us ; the reality of im- 
mortality ; the meaning of evil, the use of sorrow ; what 
we are, whether 6 the cunningest clock in the universe,' 
or a living will and spirit, free to act upon and change 
the world around us — these things we cannot demon- 
strate ; often we float between belief and unbelief of 
them, as we float ourselves between life and death. It 
is our sincerest sorrow that the things we want most 
in our most earnest moments, we know least about, 
accurately ; and the things we want least, we are best 
acquainted with. 

In another way also the increase of scientific know- 
ledge increases sorrow. It gives pleasure to those in the 
sphere of that knowledge ; it increases the sorrow of 
many who are not within that sphere. Tor the solution 
of many scientific problems has set before theologians 
and many Christian men who love the old opinions in 
which they have been brought up, new difficulties in 
their region, new troubles for their early faith. The 
unknitting of one enigma is often the knitting together 
of a hundred elsewhere. Peace made in one sphere of 
knowledge is often war made in another. The suffering 
caused among thousands by scientific discoveries is a 
real suffering. 

Therefore, as Christ's minister, I would ask scientific 
men to remember this, and to be tolerant, if those whom 
fchey touch so rudely cry out. It is not from anger 



' Melencolia! 



235 



they cry out so much as from pain. I ask for the 
gentleness of superior knowledge, for some feeling that 
the scientific sphere of thought does not include all 
the interests of men 5 for such thought of the suffering 
they give to the weak as will lead them to explain how, 
in their opinion, their discoveries bear upon matters of 
faith. If the leaders of science in England will only 
explain their position and try to understand that of the 
theologians, omitting a few sneers which for the time 
reduce them to the level of their violent opponents, 
they will do a real good. I do not want the slightest 
relaxation in any effort to find truths, nor the slightest 
hesitation in expounding them, because of the suffer- 
ing they may inflict. If a thousand old beliefs were 
ruined in our march to truth, we must still march on. 
But I ask scientific men to do their spiriting gently, 
or, as I should say, in the spirit of Christ ; severe to 
Pharisaism, but kind to weakness and ignorance ; not 
too ready to find Pharisaism everywhere nor to expect 
too much of others, but presuming that many have 
as much real difficulty in accepting their propositions 
as they would have in accepting those of the orthodox. 

On the other hand, I claim tolerance for the natural 
philosophers from the orthodox. The increase of their 
knowledge is to many scientific men an increase of 
sorrow, for it brings with it isolation from the ranks of 
faith. They are the servants and soldiers of physical 
truth, and they are devoted to their mistress. I know 
that they would suffer martyrdom as readily and as 
firmly as any of the Christian martyrs rather than deny 
their faith. I know that their sacrifice of wealth and 



236 



* Melencolia. 



'of the world to the pursuit of truth would put to shame 
the life of many a religious boaster. One need but 
mention Faraday to prove this. All the world knows 
the sacrifices he made for the sake of science. 

But they are often forced to put forward truths 
which conflict with orthodox views. A cry is at once 
raised against them, and they are forced into an atti- 
tude of opposition. Their highest duty, the discovery 
of truth, is made their greatest sin. They cannot cease 
their work without being guilty of the worst possible 
falsehood— yet this devotion is made the means of 
isolating them, the source of accusations which, if true, 
would separate them altogether from the realm of 
spiritual, even of imaginative feeling. I claim for them 
in the name of Christ grateful consideration. Some of 
them feel keenly their enforced isolation ; and the scorn 
and hard speaking, and sometimes the touch of bravado 
in the tone of others, have their roots in the want of 
thought and want of charity with which they have been 
met. 

Thus not only does the increase of knowledge increase 
the sorrow which comes with the fresh statement of 
theological problems, but it also increases, at present, 
the division between religious and scientific men. The 
proper remedy for this last sorrowful thing is the ex- 
tension of the spirit of Christ's love. If men were to 
believe and hope the best of one another, if men strove 
to understand each other, we might hope for a quicker 
reconciliation between science and religion. 

But, resuming our main thread of thought, what is 
the remedy for the sadness of increased uncertainty 



' ' Melencolia? 



237 



wliicn growing knowledge lias added to spiritual pro- 
blems ? The remedy is plainly stated in the New 
Testament. But let 11s see if we cannofc approach the 
New Testament statement from the side of scientific 
practice, and so strengthen its force. 

The certainties of science are mixed up also with 
uncertainties. Beyond what is known extends a belt 
of shadow land, over which the clouds lift and fall. To 
say nothing of the fact that many of the assumed 
theories of science are not and probably never can be 
demonstrated, there are points in all the sciences 
where intellect at present fails and where investiga- 
tion has no further materials. The cloud settles down ; 
the questions, eagerly put, remain unsolved. Towards 
these uncertainties what is the practice and the attitude 
of men of science ? It is, first — I put it in Scripture 
words — that of men who possess a c faith which worketh 
by love.' They believe in truth, and their faith works 
through love of truth. Nature may seem to err, seem 
to contradict herself, but she does neither the one nor 
the other. It is we who are, they say, blind, defective, 
ignorant. But if we are faithful to truth and love it ; 
if we do not relax our questioning, we shall be rewarded 
by finding truth; and if we are not, we shall have 
prepared the way for others. It is not only in the 
spiritual world but also in the scientific that the words 
of Christ are true. 6 Ask, and ye shall receive ; seek, and 
ye shall find ; knock, and it shall be opened to you.' 

So, though there is a sadness of science born of 
uncertainty, it is a noble sadness. It is felt only in 
moments when work is suddenly suspended ; and^the 



1 Melencolia! 



effect it lias is not despairing, but inspiring. It is a 
sadness which does not last long enough to cripple 
energy or to pass into despair. It stings, on the con- 
trary, into activity, and its legitimate child is hope. It 
is a sadness which has wings, and is crowned with 
the foliage of spring. Tor it has faith in truth which 
works by love of truth. 

Well, what has been the result of this kind of work 
spread over many years ? The swiftest and the safest 
success ! In other spheres, then, and in a different 
meaning, this text is true, e This is the victory which 
overcometh the world ; even our faith.' Not credulity, 
remember, not trust in authority as such, but faith in 
ultimate order : the two highest expressions of which 
faith in the case of the physical philosopher are, first, 
patience in investigation and reticence of decision — for 
e he that believeth shall not make haste ; ' and, secondly, 
systematic scepticism, till absolute demonstration is 
effected ; for the moment a physical philosopher is so 
enamoured of his theory as to consider it proved before 
it is proved, he is punished by being rendered blind to 
new light. 

In every way this is a lesson which we would do well 
to learn. We are surrounded with uncertainties be- 
longing to the sphere of the spirit. We have enough 
light up to a certain point — enough to walk by ; beyond 
that, the cloud settles down. We put question after 
question ; each one has its own nest of difficulties, and 
out of the calm heavens no answer is at once vouch- 
safed. Nothing is more astonishing to me than the 
way, in which people expect, and even claim, that their 



* Melencolia! 



239 



spiritual enigmas should at once be resolved without 
any trouble on their part, without any work, without 
any investigation. They build np theories of theology 
and explain all things by their theories ; but they do not 
take the pains to bring their theories face to face with 
the facts of spiritual life. They are precisely in the 
same position towards a true science of the spirit that 
the old scholastic philosophers were towards a true 
science of nature. Suddenly their theory 'is forced into 
contact with a spiritual fact — the revolt, for example, of 
the moral sense of men against the punishment of the 
innocent as an adequate satisfaction for the sin of the 
guilty — and then the whole theory breaks np into frag- 
ments, and they either cling blindly to it in passionate 
anger, or they are plunged into the despair of eternal 
night. They become fanatics or infidels. Their dark 
anger, and their melancholy hopelessness, are alike 
ignoble. But for the large class who are not slaves to 
theories bnt touched now and then with the melancholy 
born of uncertainty, what is the remedy ? 

It is the same in principle as that of the natural 
philosopher. It is faith in God which worketh by love 
of God. The root of our cowardice, of our hesitation, 
of our inactive melancholy, is our faithlessness. We 
are not asked at first to believe in certain doctrines, or 
in the opinions of men. We are asked to believe in 
Eternal Right, in a Father of spirits whose will is good. 
This is the first and foremost step. And belief in this 
Being is not credulity, nor is it founded on mere 
authority. It is based on the moral intuitions, it 
becomes a moral certainty to many by the way it has 



240 



' Melencolia! 



answered the personal difficulties of the soul m daily 
experience, by the way in which it has supported the 
soul in trial, enabled it to conquer evil and grow in 
good during the long struggle of a lifetime : it draws 
to itself proof after proof by the explanations which it 
has given in the past to the spiritual difficulties of the 
race. If, then, we believe in absolute goodness, truth, 
justice, and love in God, why are we idle, indifferent, 
fearful, or ignobly sad, always complaining of the un- 
intelligible world? Our faith should be a working 
quality, working through love of perfect right. Then, 
when we find evil in the world, apparent contradictions of 
love, apparent violations of justice, apparent cruelties, 
darkness where we most hoped and expected clear light, 
we do not accuse God any more than the philosophers 
accuse nature. We accuse ourselves : we are defective, 
we say, blind, ignorant. Some evil has set us wrong, 
our nature has got twisted. Let us recognise our want 
and seek the remedy, let us set our wrong right, cure 
ourselves of our evil ; feeling sure that, if we seek the 
Righteous One, He is bound by His nature to help us. 
For if we be faithful to God, and love Him, if we go on 
working, and questioning, striving and experimenting, 
asking, asking, in the prayer of action in accordance 
with what we know for certain is right, we shall be 
rewarded by the slow dissipation of uncertainties. I do 
not say that all uncertainties will be cleared away, for 
that would mean our perfection. But enough will be 
dispersed to enable us to work with hope, to fill us with 
a vital certainty of future attainment ; enough to in- 
duce us to keep the torch of effort alight 3 and to hand 



1 Mekncoiia? 



241 



it 011 with assurance to the seekers for truth who 
follow us. 

It is true we are not altogether freed from melan- 
choly, but it is no longer what it was. We still fall, 
when life pauses and we are weary, into the meditative 
melancholy of which we have spoken, but it is the noble 
melancholy which urges us to labour, and is, in fact, 
that passing passiveness of thought in which exhaustion 
is repaired and new force stored up for toil. For, he 
who is instinct with love of God, and rooted in faith in 
God, cannot rest in sadness till sadness becomes weak- 
ness and hopelessness. His own thought 6 drives him 
like a goad.' He springs once more into the doing of 
justice, love, and truth, and as he doss these things the 
dawn grows brighter in the sky, the morning comes, and 
his life, at last, is flooded with the sunshine of belief 
that all is well. His faith has overcome the lazy, faith- 
less, lifeless, fearful spirit of the world. 

Lastly. This is not a faith in the commandments 
and doctrines of men. It is a faith in Eternal Love. * It 
is not a blind credulity ; it is a faith which the man has 
proved in adversity, and by which he has conquered. 
It is not a faith which reposes on authority; it is a faith 
which, as it developes, he finds answer one question after 
another. It is not a faith which hurries to its end and 
is indignant if a spiritual difficulty is not solved im- 
mediately ; it is a faith which has learnt something of 
the slowness with which God educates the race, and 
therefore will not rashly make a theory, and say, This, 
and this only, is the solution. It is a patient and 
reticent faith ; it is, if I may use the word, a sceptical, 



' Melencolia? 



that is, an enquiring faith, which is not satisfied with the 
light it has, but ever on the watch for brighter light ; it 
holds to all opinions and theories slightly, being ready 
to surrender them for higher truth. It is satisfied to 
clothe itself for the time being in existing formulae, 
so long as they help it forward, but always sceptical 
of their enduring worth, because it is not sceptical of 
progress ; a faith, therefore, which no revolution in 
religious thought, no change in religious opinion, no 
new discovery in any other sphere of truth which seems 
to conflict with its truth for a time, can ever shake or 
paralyse. Nay, it expects these revolutions, for it be- 
lieves in progressive revelation. It does not believe 
that all truth has been disclosed, and stagnate in that 
thought. It believes in a Father who is guiding the 
world into the whole of truth, not fixing the world down 
to a truth. 

This is the true method of seeking into the mysteries 
of the spiritual world, and it is a method strictly analo- 
gous to that used by the natural philosopher who seeks 
into the mysteries of the physical world. 

Use it, and however the increase of knowledge may 
increase your sorrow, your sorrow under its influence 
will be noble while it lasts — invigorating, not depres- 
sing. It will kindle you into the action of faith and 
love, and in action it will be transmuted into joy. 



i Melencolia? 



243 



< MELENCOLIA. 

'For in much wisdom is much grief : and he that increaseth knowledge 
increaseth sorrow.' — Eccles. i. 18. 

In speaking of this text last Sunday, we considered 
only the sorrow which may arise from the increase of 
scientific knowledge, and its remedy. We found that 
the idea of the German artist in his plate of 4 Melen- 
colia' was at the root of the whole question. In 
moments of quiet thought, when, as is the case with 
Diirer's great Genius of Knowledge and Toil, we are 
suddenly arrested and pass into the region of specula- 
tive questioning, the contrast between the possibility 
of demonstrating truth, for example, in the science of 
numbers, and the impossibility of demonstrating the 
truth, for example, of immortality, weaves a subtile 
sadness for our souls. 

But there are other causes for melancholy; and 
it is interesting to see what the Nuremberg artist 
says about them. The great genius, for I must repeat 
the description, sits in an hour of pause from labour, 
her head resting on her hand, looking forth in resolute 
but infinite sadness of thought into the world of 
being. Her eyes see, but see nothing of the things 
around her ; her arm rests on a great book and her 



244 



' Melencolia? 



hand grasps the open compasses. The instruments of 
the carpenter, geometer, and alchemist lie at her feet, 
where also sleeps a great wolf-hound. Over her head 
the square window in the house is divided into sixteen 
squares, each filled with a number. In whatever way 
you add these — -horizontally, vertically, or diagonally — 
they make the same sum, thirty-four ; this, with the 
poised balances, expresses that scientific certainty of 
which we have spoken. By the side of this square 
hangs an hour-glass whose sands are half run, and a 
bell. Seated on a millstone leaning against the house, 
is a small winged boy with tablet and pencil. Far off, 
beyond the platform, the sea is seen, with castles and 
towns on the shore : the sun has set, and a fiery comet, 
whose rays fill the whole sky, menaces the world below, 
but over it arches a rainbow, and across it flies a bat 
with outstretched wings bearing a scroll, on which is 
written c Melencolia.' 

What did Albert Diirer mean by this ? I said last- 
Sunday that the first thing to remember in explaining 
the picture (which is, indeed, an illustration of my text 
and of the feeling of this whole book of Ecclesiastes) 
was that the Angel of Knowledge and Labour was repre- 
sented in that hour of sudden arrest of work which 
comes not rarely upon our life, when carried away in 
a moment into the world of speculative meditation we 
ask ourselves, What has my labour done for others, or 
for me ? — what is my knowledge worth ? The temper of 
such an hour is one of melancholy. It arose, partly, as 
we have seen, from the contrast of one certainty with 
many uncertainties, and the terrible irony in that. 



'Melencolia? 



H5 



It arises, next, from the thought that life is too short, 
even for the most ardent labour, to wrest from the 
bosom of nature, or the ocean of the soul, a thousandth 
part of their secrets. Before we have, as it were, 
crossed the threshold of the temple of knowledge, the 
sands in the glass above our head are half run, and We , 
place the bell there, in readiness to toll our requiem. 
Man is not, but is i like a thing of nought ; his time 
passeth away like a shadow.' This is one of the 
elements of such an hour of melancholy. And it 
is the increase of knowledge which has given it all 
its serious pain. For as long as we knew little and 
flitted from one enjoyment of sense to another, finding- 
all our pleasure in the excitements of mere animal 
being, life had no noble value in it. We wished to live, 
because it was pleasant to live, and when we thought 
of death, it was, not with the solemn melancholy of 
which we speak, but either with a light laugh as not 
realising it, or, if realising it, with a bitter anger. 
But as our knowledge increased, and our labour became 
more earnest, and we felt that there were endless 
capabilities in us of attaining the first and of making 
the second useful to man — then, in an hour of sudden * 
and secluded thought, when we realised that our life 
was more than half over, that all the mighty interests, 
hopes, and powers which had come to us, and made 
existence a scene of dramatic passion, were soon to 
be paralysed with age and smitten with death — then, 
the tide of a noble melancholy floated in npon the soul. 
Our work rests, our books are clasped, our soul looks 
through our eyes far into the future. c Death comes/ 



246 



' Melencolia? 



we think ; 6 is all I have done for others and learnt for 
myself lost ? Why may I not live to finish my work, 
to complete and round my knowledge ? If death be all, 
then the increase of my knowledge is the increase of 
my sorrow.' 

The remedy and the answer lie in the teaching of 
Christ. He has brought, it is true, upon the world, an 
increased dread of death, for He has deepened the sense 
of moral responsibility. But in deepening responsibility 
He has also brought upon the world an increased de- 
light in life, because He has made life more earnest, 
active, and progressive. Duties which have a clear 
fulfilment possible, aspirations which have a true hope 
of being realised — these make life interesting, alive, 
even passionate. The first remedy, then, when the 
haunting thought of death comes to shroud our little 
term of being with melancholy, is to take up with 
eagerness again the duties and responsibilities of life. 
In doing these the sense of life, and necessarily the 
sense of joy, will begin again to thrill within us ; things 
which cannot die and are gifted with the power of 
convincing us of their innate immortality — love, justice, 
truth, and purity — become ours by the doing of them, 
and weave their divine eternity into our being. We 
look to Christ, and the two sources of the melancholy 
of which we speak — the idea of our work perishing, the 
idea of a cessation of the growth of knowledge — vanish 
away. He died, it is true, when half the natural sands 
of life were run. But we see that his labour has not 
died with Him. It has passed as a power and life into 
the world. While He lived, his words and deeds were 



i Melencolia." 



247 



only forcible and productive in Palestine. Now that 
He has passed from earth, they have pervaded nations. 
And our work done in his spirit has the same infinite 
quality. It does not cease with our breath. It lives 
and moves in other men. It is handed on from 
generation to generation in a tradition of action, 
accumulating force from the new human power which 
different men have added to it. Being done in union 
with the eternal humanity of Christ, it belongs to and 
suits developing mankind — nay, more, it developes with 
mankind. All we have to do is to do it now with all 
our heart, and soul, and strength, looking unto Jesus ; 
and we may rejoice that not one shred of it is lost. 

Oar echoes flow from soul to soul, 
And grow for ever and for ever. 

Moreover, we are also freed in Christ from the second 
source of this sadness, the idea that our knowledge 
shall cease to grow. For in Him we are ourselves 
immortal, and the work which we have started, and 
left to others here, we carry on ourselves in the larger 
world beyond. But if so, it will require added know- 
ledge, and indeed in its progress it will necessarily 
store up knowledge. In Christ, we know then that 
we shall never cease to learn, to investigate, to add to 
our stock of knowledge, and therefore to our stock of 
power. 

Masters of a divine hope, we escape from the shadow 
of this melancholy. We watch the sands running 
away and listen to the passing bell, if not with joy, at 
least with a new growth of resolution in the soul. And 
in cheerful effort, and in fortitude of heart, we pass out 



248 



1 ' Melencolia! 



of transient sorrow into the activity which exalts the 
present life and looks forward to a boundless develop- 
ment in the future. 

The second source of melancholy in such an hour of 
arrested labour is retrospective thought. We look back 
from the position which our manhood has reached on 
our youth and childhood. We see ourselves like the 
tiny genius seated on the millstone, just beginning the 
career of learning which we have run ; our wirfgs of 
thought and imagination just starting from our shoul- 
ders — with the eagerness of important ignorance, with 
no shadow of the coming burden of weariness — winning 
with tablet and pencil the first elements of knowledge. 
Since then we have ceaselessly followed our course. Day 
by day we have increased in knowledge ; and what has 
come of it all — of the hopes with which we began, of 
the unclouded weather of our brain, of the light 
6 which never was on sea or land,' of the life whose 
fountains were so full, of the boundless possibilities we 
pictured, of the easy dalliance with our powers ? Dis- 
appointment, and weary thought, and twilight in the 
soul, and death, the slow death of power, and the ex- 
haustion of the force of faculties by too rapid an use ; 
and instead of a boundless range of view, a small defined 
horizon, and a voice which says - in irony to a soul 
doomed never to be contented, 6 Be content with your 
limitations.' Fame has come to such a man — the laurel 
is round his brow ; wealth — the purse is at his feet ; 
some practical power, the keys of which ar@ at his 
girdle ; but for these things he has ceased to care ; for 
' the heavy and the weary weight of the unintelligible 



1 Melencolia! 



249 



world/ more weary tlie finer our feeling has been made 
by knowledge, more heavy the more subtile and in- 
quisitive our thought has been made by accurate 
learning, has come upon him. Increase of knowledge 
has awakened emotions for which he finds no channel, 
has created wants of the soul for which he finds no 
food. He desires the higher knowledge, because he 
has secured the lower, and there is no voice, nor any 
that answereth. 

Then, in such an hour of passing melancholy as we 
speak of, he envies the light-hearted childhood which 
no question troubled ; he remembers sorrows of youth 
which were more excellent pleasure than the joys of 
after-life ; the good old time, when he was so miserable. 
It were worth all his knowledge to get back again, even 
for a day, 'the wild freshness of morning; 5 the early 
enthusiasm which sang like the lark, f at heaven's gate.' 

It is still sadder in such an hour, if we look back, not 
at our own youth, but at the children whom our career 
has inspired, who are beginning as we began — unwarned 
by our failure, disbelieving in our grief — with the same 
delight and the same hopes ; delight which will grow 
as chill as ours, hopes which will droop as ours have 
done, and unbelief in sorrow which will grow into faith 
in pain, the only faith which in our hour of depression 
we possess. 

So whether w r e see in Diirer's symbol of the child- 
genius, who sits near the great angel of the knowledge 
and toil of earth, the image of her own youth, or the 
image of another who is beginning the same exhausting 
effort, the thought is still full of melancholy. 



250 



1 Melencolia! 



Now wliat is the remedy of this retrospective sadness ? 
As long as this melancholy which we have described is 
transient, as Diirer intended it to be, filling np a paren- 
thesis between labour and labour, it is not an ignoble 
but a noble melancholy. For it is in reality the cry of 
our human nature, in contact with death and failure, 
for fuller life. It is the voice of our mightiest and 
purest spiritual appetite, making itself heard through 
the atmosphere of dull decay. 

Only it is mistaken in that to which it looks. It looks 
back to youth, and pictures that time as the time when 
life was richest and deepest. The spiritual fact is that 
in youth we had less life, if we have developed ourselves 
truly, than we have now. We are now more complex, 
our spiritual and intellectual functions have a larger 
number of organs to perform them ; and complexity of 
being and specialisation of functions attend and charac- 
terise higher life. We may have less careless freshness, 
less unsullied purity, less clearness of vision, but we 
have more practical power, more ease in sympathy, 
and if our vision is less clear it is because we have so 
much more to observe and consider. We have stored 
up a reservoir of force ; we have taken into ourselves 
powers and new elements from all sides. We are like 
the great river, which may for a moment regret its 
noisy freshness and its crystal clearness when it was 
born among the hills, but which with a wiser mind 
prefers its full-volumed stream. Tor it has added to 
its waters a thousand rivulets, and with them, tidings 
from a hundred hills ; and though its broad tide is 
stained with loosened clay, and charged with decaying 




* Melencolia! 



elements, yet it fertilises a whole country side, deposits 
far away new deltas for the life and toil of men, and 
bears upon its bosom the commerce of the nations. 
It is so with our manhood's labour, and the thought 
should place a heart of joy in the midst of our melan- 
choly. 

Moreover, our strong crying and tears in effort which 
has never reached its earthly end, our long and un- 
rewarded toil of love and knowledge, are not lost in 
us. They are in reality latent powers in the soul, 
which in an undefective world will become strength of 
thought and ease of attainment. As the forces of the 
sunlight stored up in the vegetation of the coal break 
forth again millions of years afterwards to cheer a happy 
fireside at Christmas time with light and heat, so the 
stored-up force of our endurance will manifest itself as 
passionate joy under new conditions of being. Nay, 
we may even measure the hidden force of life within us 
by the depth of our sorrow. 

This is the answer we may give ourselves when the 
increase of spiritual or mental knowledge has deepened 
in us, in a transient passage of melancholy, the pain of 
the contrast between the hopes of youth and the toil of 
manhood. 

But, if such a melancholy were to continue — if, as 
some do, we cherish retrospect and find our only plea- 
sure in remembering what we were, in continually 
wailing over dead ideals — then the answer is sharper 
and sterner. It is given in the results which this 
unmanly melancholy brings. We become useless, 
dreamy, slothful men; we become indifferent to the 



252 



1 ' Melencolia! 



great interests of the Present, because we are absorbed 
in the Past. "W'e cease to grow, because we are isolated 
in self; and he who ceases to grow goes back slowly 
into the realm of nothingness and death. We are a 
dead weight on the progress of the world. Our idle- 
ness is an injury to the race ; and the race rejects and 
despises us. Then our melancholy, face to face with 
this contempt, changes its nature ; its dainty sweetness 
departs, and is succeeded by the coarse sourness of an 
old age of scorn. 

That is the stern reply of law to the man who indulges 
in the continued melancholy of retrospect, to whom 
added knowledge has only brought despair of the future. 

It is unmanliness to t linger thus among the tombs. 
Christ calls us to a higher thought of life. Let dead 
ideals bury themselves, He says ; come away from them 
and follow Me ; there are other ideals in front, better 
and larger than the past. S. Paul accepts and realises 
the whole position. 'When I was a child, I spake as 
a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child ; 
but when I became a man, I put away childish things.' 
There is no unmanly retrospect in that, neither is there 
any depreciation of childhood. It had its own ways, 
they were good then — it was a joyful time, that too 
was good — but to wish it back again, except for a 
moment, were unworthy. Manhood brings nobler work, 
higher duties ; and the child-life and youth are to be 
put away for ever. Nor was this said by one who did 
not feel the weight of the trouble which besets manhood. 
For he goes on : c Now we see through a glass darkly ' — 
'now we know in part.' But, observe, the pain does 



1 Melencolia! 



253 



not send him back for comfort, but forward. He steps 
out of a barren melancholy, being the possessor of an 
earnest faith and a saving hope. The time is coming 
when we shall see face to face, when we shall know as 
we are known : indistinct knowledge which bringeth 
sorrow, partial knowledge which itself is grief, shall 
vanish in clear light of perfect truth, in completed 
knowledge, and clearness and completion are faultless 
joy. It is the one inspiring element of Christianity 
that it throws us in boundless hope upon the future and 
forbids us to dwell in the poisonous shadows of the 
past. A new and better growth is before us, a fresher, 
a diviner, a more enthusiastic life awaits us. We are 
to wake up satisfied in the likeness of Christ, the ever- 
young Humanity. Therefore, forgetting those things 
which are behind, let us press forward unto the mark 
of the prize of our high calling in Christ Jesus. 

Lastly. There is a third source of melancholy in 
such an hour of arrested labour which is symbolised 
by the German artist and which illustrates my text. 

The ladder, the geometrical figure, the tools of the 
architect and the carpenter, lie scattered at the feet of 
the genius. They have been used by knowledge for the 
labour of men. They are the instruments of that in- 
creased knowledge whose child is civilisation. What 
have they done for the world ? We see the result in the 
engraving. There is the sea — a reminiscence of the 
Venetian lagoons, and carrying with it in the artist's 
mind the whole idea of the glory and wealth, of the 
commerce and civilisation of Venice — and on its borders 
are cities, ports, churches, fortifications, watch-towers. 



254 



i Melencolia! 



Has civilisation, the result of toil and knowledge, 
brought happiness to men ? No ; but the strifes of theo- 
logy, the curse and vice of wealth, wars, and the anger 
of nations, men preying on one another, woe and pain 
to the weak, evil souls to the strong. So Albert of 
Nuremberg, oppressed in his hour of thought with the 
misery of the suffering world, suffering from its know- 
ledge, and the more it knows, places over the citied sea- 
board the fiery comet in the sky, which 

Disastrous twilight sheds, and with fear of change 
Perplexes nations, 

and sends the bat forth to fly across the angry heaven 
with the apocalyptic scroll on which is written ' Melen- 
colia,' to cry aloud the sadness of the world. 

It is a sorrow which we all know in many a paren- 
thesis of meditation, a sorrow which of all else is the 
most profound and the most consuming. 

What is its remedy ? Some will tell you to look only 
on the bright side of things, and to enjoy life, ignoring 
the evil. Others are content to rest in optimism, and 
to believe that all is well. But the real fact is, that 
there is more of the dark side than the light, and that 
things are not well to us at all, but very ill. Nor is 
the joyful faith in God which refuses to see evil that 
temper in which the noblest work has been done, nor 
does it, in the end, do anything for the world as long 
as it refuses to see the wrong in the world. It leaves 
its possessor both spiritually and intellectually weak ; 
it lulls him into a lotus-eating repose which can do 
nothing to redeem mankind, and when the sorrow and 
evil of the world are forced home, as they probably will 



1 ' Melencolia! 



255 



be, on such a soul, he breaks down under the revelation, 
overwhelmed. 

The true remedy is to penetrate steadily into the very 
depths of the dreadful mystery ; to comprehend what 
destiny, and evil, and death mean ; to go down into 
hell and know it, and conquer it. This is what Christ 
did, in resolute action upon earth, and out of this 
meeting- of evil and sorrow face to face, not by passing 
them by and ignoring them, sprang his conquest — 
evil was overthrown, sorrow was changed into joy, 
death was swallowed up in victory — because He went 
down into hell. 

This is what S. Paul did in resolute thought which 
refused to smooth away a single difficulty in the mystery 
of God's dealing with the world. In chapters ix., x., and 
xi. of his Epistle to the Eomans, he deliberately meets 
the dreadful questions of the apparent unrighteousness 
and unfairness of God's dealings with mankind. Their 
terror, their ambiguity, their unrelenting march — he 
goes down into the abyss of them all. All his powers 
are concentrated into an unflinching gaze into the 
darkness. And what was the result ? It was the same 
in the region of thought as Christ had arrived at in the 
region of action. It was conquest. Listen to what 
came of brave resolution to know the worst, to evade 
no difficulty : £ For God hath concluded them all in 
unbelief that He might have mercy upon all. Oh, the 
depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge 
of God ; how unsearchable are His judgments, and His 
ways past finding out ! for of Him, and through Him, 
and to Him are all things. To Him be glory for ever 



256 



1 Melcmolia? 



and ever. Amen.' The whole world contained and 
living in God. That was the answer. 

Brethren, if we wish to win this conquest, we must 
do in action and thought what Christ and his Apostle 
did— realise the evil of our own hearts and of the 
world, fully and entirely, and set ourselves to meet it, 
resolving to be true and fearless, to keep our integrity 
and purity, so far as possible, clean and bright; but 
not in avoidance and ignoring of evil and its mystery, 
but in battle with it ; not looking too much to the 
other world, but living seriously in this world; not 
seeking too much for peace of heart, nor expecting 
it, but in much tribulation following Christ ; not queru- 
lously complaining of intellectual difficulties, but wait- 
ing and working, in sad but resolute faith, towards 
light. 

I believe victory comes forth from that — practical 
success in conquering wrong and setting things right ; 
and intellectual power able to answer the dreadful mys- 
teries which overwhelm humanity. 

In this way, the melancholy which Diirer symbolises 
does not induce despair, but urges to activity. He seems 
to have felt this. There is the light of coming action 
in the eyes of the Angel of the Toil and Intelligence of 
Earth. She has seen the depths of sorrow and sin, and 
they can terrify her mind and chill her energy no more. 
She will soon open the book, and move the compasses, 
and take up again the instruments of the uncontented 
toil of knowledge. Pain may be increased by know- 
ledge, but it is the pain of the travail of a new birth. 
The insight she has gained into evil will make her work 



1 Melencolia! 



257 



in the future more unyielding, more enduring. In the 
very centre of the dark sorrow she has canght a glimpse 
of the light of far-off victory ; and so above the bat- 
like scroll of melancholy, and the disastrous twilight, 
and the menace of the comet, the spiritual artist of 
Germany threw the triumphal arch of the rainbow, the 
symbol of a divine bnt distant hope. 

The increase of knowledge includes the increase of 
sorrow ; but the knowledge of the depth of sorrow is 
the gate of a divine joy. 



12 



2 5% Art Expenditure. 



ART EXPENDITURE. 

1 Why Vr'frs not iliis ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given 
to the poor ? ' — John xii. 5. 

There were, once upon a time, two men who were 
friends, but whose characters and pursuits in life were 
different. The one was a lover of Beauty, the other a 
lover, as he said, of Use. The latter had given up his 
life to 6 practical purposes ; 5 he had built houses for 
the poor, he had arranged the sanitary measures of a 
city, he had visited the prisons and the hospitals, and 
had toiled to save disease and crime. And his cha- 
racter and strength were suited to this work, so that he 
did it well. 

The other hacf spent his life in examining the Beau- 
tiful ; he had studied its laws in nature and art, and he 
devoted himself in retirement to expressing what he 
had discovered in the most beautiful manner possible : 
his enthusiasm pushed him to think that men would 
be interested in his work, and his aim was to awaken 
in the world the love of Beauty by giving a high and 
noble pleasure. He did not care to teach morality as 
the first thing, but to make beautiful things familiar ; 
and by bringing these beautiful things before men, to 
refine imaginations not as yet refined, till they could 



Art Expenditure. 



259 



see the more ideal beauty. This being his work, and 
his character and physical temper being suited to it, 
he did it well, and he did nothing else. He did not 
visit the poor, nor was he seen in hospitals. His money 
was spent on beautiful things such as he wanted for 
his work, not on sanitary improvements and model 
cottages. 

With this life and with this expenditure his friend 
became angry. 6 What ! ' he said, c will you make poems 
while famine is making death? The poor are perishing ; 
God's children are being done to death ; disease and 
crime are devouring the nation, and you sit still in 
your poetic and artistic leisure, producing only words. 
Throw away all this useless work, attack evil, expose 
oppression, cleanse the foal dwelling, see and realise 
what poverty and pain mean. To what purpose is this 
waste ? These things which you call beautiful might be 
sold for much money, and given to the poor.' So he 
spoke in his dark anger ; and the spirit of his friend 
was moved, and he went forth into the rude work of 
the world. It sickened and dismayed him ; his poetical 
power went from him; his faculty for revealing the 
Beautiful passed away ; his delicacy and sympathy 
caused him to break down in contact with crime and 
disease. He tried hard, but it was failure ; his life was 
ruined, and no good was done. He could not do his 
friend's work, and trying to do it, he ceased to be able 
to do his own. 

Now, I say that this sort of thing, so common now, is 
not only a pity, bat that a great wrong is done to man- 



260 



Art Expenditure. 



kind by this Judas cry. Each man has his own work, 
and it is a shameful thing, if any of us, imagining that 
our peculiar work is the only important one, take ad- 
vantage of our greater violence of character and drag 
away our friend from his work to enlist him as our 
follower. It is then that we should hear the words of 
Christ : 6 Let her alone : why trouble ye the woman ? 
she hath wrought a good work for Me.' For they are 
the consecration of those labours which do not directly 
act upon the welfare of men, but indirectly on it 
through the awakening of feeling ; they are the con- 
secration of the expenditure of time and money upon 
things which kindle in the heart the sense of beauty, 
and bring with them the thoughts which exalt and 
adorn existence. This, with the thoughts bound up 
with it, is our subject this morning. 

First. It is no wonder that there are many who have 
indignation at the apparent waste of time upon the arts, 
who demand that all our expenditure should be visibly 
reproductive. For the worst sin of our society is its 
waste of wealth. Night and day, while the commonest 
necessities of decent living are not placed in the power 
of those in want of them, Dives and his crew cast hun- 
dreds of pounds into the Thames, and excuse themselves 
on the plea, so often proved a false one, that expenditure 
on dress and luxuries encourages trade and adds to the 
wealth of the country. They cannot, and they will not 
understand that buying seeds and then burning them 
is a different thing from sowing seed in the earth which 
will spring up in thirty fold ears of corn. It is no 
wonder, I repeat, that there are many who, indignant 



Art Expenditure. 



261 



at this waste, should call upon all to make the directly 
useful the aim of expenditure. 

And utility ought always to be the end of expenditure. 

Bat, is there only one utility in relation to the wel- 
fare of men? Must all expenditure increase the material 
happiness of man ? are we never doing man good, except 
when we are providing for his outward wants or giving 
him an education which will enable him to get on in 
the world ? Even in matters like food and dress are 
we forced to restrain our expenditure to that which is 
absolutely necessary ? Expenditure beyond the neces- 
sary on these things is certainly unproductive, but is it 
always useless ? I answer, that we are bound not only 
to assist the poor, but also to charm our society, to 
show that we have thought of others by our desire to 
delight them. Within certain limits, expenditure on 
dress is useful in producing a social ease and charm. 
Where it is entirely neglected — in a household, for 
example — it produces domestic quarrels, and it really 
means not only carelessness of person, but carelessness 
of pleasing. 

Expenditure on it is not productive of material good 
to others — it is productive of. another kind of good 
altogether. 

Then there is also the question of food. Within 
certain limits some extra expenditure on providing 
a pleasant banquet for one's friends is not truly unpro- 
ductive. It is a symbol of our willingness to please, 
of our desire to give of our best to those we love and 
honour, and as such it rises out of the common and 
material into the spiritual. In both cas'es persons may 



262 



Art Expenditure, 



come to you and say, 6 Why was not this dress, these 
wines, sold for money and given to the poor ?' In both 
cases we may reply 011 the same principle on which - 
Christ replied. 

But observe — the real aim in both these cases in which 
I have said that expenditure apparently unproductive 
is good, has been the desire to please, the desire to 
express affection, the desire to give — the same desires 
which filled the woman's heart in the Gospel. 

Are those the desires which guide the unbridled ex- 
penditure of society on food and dress ? Is that the 
aim with which vast sums — vast when one thinks of the 
misery they might help to remedy — are uselessly cast 
away upon luxurious dinners and costly clothing? 

Not at all. Everyone is aware that the usual aim is 
to make a show ; to have society talking of our splen- 
dour ; to rival our neighbour, not in elegance but in ex- 
penditure ; to hear the world talking of the great sums 
spent at our supper, or of the endless variety of our 
dress. And on the whole, is there a meaner or more 
contemptible ambition in the world than this ? It is 
not the ambition to make the world more beautiful, 
it is self-display; it is not the ambition to please 
others, J.t is the desire to win an envious applause at 
the expense of others, for half the pleasure derived is 
in the thought that others are left behind in this race 
of fashionable fame. 

Expenditure on food and dress for the sake of display 
is vile expenditure. In itself it is coarse, for its aim is 
not beauty, and it is unintelligent, for it is blindly 
led by the fashion. It is, moreover, wicked, for it 



Art Expenditure. 



is destroying wealthy and the destruction of wealth is 
theft. 

But it is allowable within certain limits, when its 
aim is the giving of a refined pleasure to others ; when 
it is a symbol of love, sympathy, or friendship. 

This leads me directly to the story in the text. 
Christ, in a certain set of circumstances, consecrated 
unproductive expenditure. A costly oil was poured 
upon his head. It expressed the love of one who 
could find no expression of her love in words. It was 
the symbol of a profound tenderness. One who stood 
by and who afterwards betrayed, put on indignation, 
and, remembering the past teaching of his Master, 
thought he would appeal directly to that teaching : 
6 Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred 
pence, and given to the poor ? To what purpose is this 
waste ? ' But Christ saw that the woman's heart 
needed expression, felt that the love not only made 
right, but glorified the expenditure ; saw that the 
scented ointment, was not ointment now, but had been 
changed into all the costlier tenderness and long 
regret of a woman's heart ; and exalting the act into 
the realm of the Divine, He put aside the mean utility 
which claimed the money for the poor. 

Observe in this his largeness of soul. Apparently 
He had contradicted Himself. He had said to the young 
ruler, c Sell all that thou hasfc, and give to the poor.' 
Would He not say that this woman had done wrong, 
especially when the money was spent on Himself? 
But Christ lived far above the sphere in which this 
objection could touch his soul. He did not care for 



264 



A rt Expenditure. 



apparent contradictions, for his sayings were founded 
on principles which expressed themselves differently 
according to the events and characters they met, and 
He knew that when men fonnd the principles they 
would understand that sayings which seemed contra- 
dictory were in reality at one. And the principle on 
which his speech to the young ruler, and his address 
to this woman were made was this — that all expenditure 
should he for the welfare of mankind. The ruler was 
to give to the poor and produce material happiness for 
those who needed it. The woman had given to the 
world one of those acts which by the expression of 
profound and noble feeling produces profound and noble 
feeling, and this was even a higher use of expenditure 
than the other, and productive of a purer welfare to the 
race. 'Wheresoever this Gospel shall be preached 
in all the world, this also which this woman hath done 
shall be told as a memorial of her.' You cannot imagine 
that Christ looked only to the fame of the woman when 
He said these words ; He looked to the true and tender 
feelings which her act would kindle in the hearts of 
men. He saw faithful and self-sacrificing love — the 
desire to give all away for the sake of another — glorified 
in her act from generation to generation, and He made 
by his approving voice the act eternal. Hence, ex- 
tending the principle, all expenditure productive of true 
feeling is noble expenditure, is useful, often, in a better 
way to man than if it had been given in mere charity, 
or lavished on promoting the material comfort of 
mankind. 

To give a man a roof over his head is important, but 



Art Expenditure. 



265 



to awake his hearty to fee(J in him the germs of sympathy, 
tenderness, and purity, to stir within him the sleeping 
enthusiasm for truth, is still more important. 

To get a man on in the world, to let him have welfare 
and peace of body, is good, but to refine his imagination, 
to lead him to love the beauty of God's world and to 
be enthusiastic in his admiration, though he never be 
able to express that enthusiasm, is still more important. 

These are the works of the poets and artists ; for I do 
not speak now of the higher work done by prophets on 
the religious spirit ; and all expenditure of any capital 
with these aims in view, is noble, though apparently 
unproductive expenditure. Only the same thing applies 
to their work which applied to the woman's act. It 
must have the expression of fine human feeling at its 
root ; it must desire to give pleasure to men ; it must 
not be for ostentation or any selfish end. If it be true 
to these aims, we may say of it, that wherever humanity 
extends, its influence will be productive of good to men. 

There are those to whom God has given this work 
to do. They must necessarily withdraw from what is 
called the practical work of the world and give them- 
selves wholly to their particular business. And I want 
to say, as my parable has hinted at the beginning, that 
all attempts made by persons who see only one form of 
being useful to men, to drag the artists, poets, and the 
rest of their tribe into the so-called practical toil of the 
world, and to torment them in their work by reproaches 
and cries of uselessness, are attempts worthy of strong 
blame, and in themselves a wicked interference with 
God's division of labour. Important and unimportant ! 



266 



Art Expenditure. 



it is curious how utterly the world misapplies these words. 
The work of a great poet or a great artist is much more 
important in its results upon the whole race than many 
of those things to which history gives undue pre- 
eminence. The life and wars of Napoleon fill several 
volumes, but their importance is as nothing before the 
life and poetry of Wordsworth. Our historians teach 
our children all about the battles of Creci and Poitiers, 
as if the war then wa ged was not absolutely detrimental 
to England; scarcely a word is said about Chaucer, and 
Wicliffe, and the great popular movements of that time. 
The quarrels of kings and nobles in our early English 
time fill page after page. Few dwell for an instant on 
the life of Bseda or the birth of English poetry with 
Caadmon, and yet the work of these two men outweighs 
in real importance a century of political squabbles. It 
is practical work to pass education bills, and to carry out 
sanitary measures, but it is not really unpractical, but 
even more practical, to influence men nobly through a 
great picture, or to kindle their hearts by a great poem. 

For the work which appeals to the soul does not end 
with the soul it influences ; it spreads from the inward 
to the outward, and the feelings which are stirred cannot 
rest till they take life in action. The poet opens a new 
world to men. He makes an image of Mankind. He 
reveals the way in which the human heart acts in many 
circumstances and relations of life. He makes all his 
readers sympathise with these varied events and men. 
In this way the world of the reader is expanded. New 
interests are given to him ; he sees in others his own 
human nature ; he sympathises with persons all over the 



Art Expenditure, 



267 



world. If he is poor lie is made to feel with the rich, if 
he is rich he is made to feel with the poor. The idea 
of a deep underlying brotherhood takes possession of 
him — and all this is done for thousands and thousands, 
from generation to generation. Most human work 
falls into nothingness before this. Further, it pro- 
motes the outward practical labour of which so much 
is said. For with the expansion of the soul comes the 
expansion of the whole nature of the man, and his 
awakened and extended feelings carry him into active 
exertion for his fellows — if that be his natural labour. 

It is the same with him who teaches men to see what 
xs beautiful. Some dare to look down upon this man's 
life as unproductive. But the Press can tell us of the 
wants of the poor, and say that the foulness of England 
is a disgrace. It is only a few artists who can teach us 
how to see the loveliness of a mountain line or the 
chord of colour in an evening cloud, to listen with a 
hearing ear to the music of the stream, or- to rejoice 
in its purity. The work of both is good, but the 
work of the first rivets the attention of men on the 
dreadful and deathful elements of human life, and 
makes the poor who listen to it miserable and indig- 
nant : the work of the other adds to the life of rich and 
poor sweeter thoughts and better elements. It calls 
their attention to that which is pure and lovely, and 
awakens in them aspiration. He who is taught to see 
and delight in the colour of a primrose has something 
henceforth in him which will go far to keep him 
from cruelty to his wife ; he who has been taught to be 
happy in the purity of a meadow stream has something 



268 



A rt Expenditure. 



ever afterwards in him which will make him loathe 
the dirt in his back-yard. 

Moreover this sort ot work fills the hours of a man's 
recreation with humanising and blessed influences. 
A man learns great lessons in his daily labour, but 
the lessons which he might learn in his hours of holi- 
day when his heart lies open to receive that teaching 
of God which comes without asking, are often higher 
because more spiritual. But a certain amount of 
teaching is necessary to cause men to open their eyes 
and to unclose their heart. Without it, unless in cases 
where there is great natural receptiveness, and oven in 
these cases teaching is needed for right direction of 
observation, the moments of a man's rest are nearly 
useless to him. It is the blessed work of the lover 
of beauty, who has spent money and time and given 
the devotion of a lifetime -to gain a knowledge of 
loveliness, to teach men to see, to open to them the 
sealed book of the Heavens and the Earth, to unfold to 
them the meaning of the work of great men in the 
arts, to pass on beyond this* and to make the heart 
thrill with the lessons which flow from the glory of 
God in the beauty of the world and the glory of man 
in the creations of art. For so the evening walk after 
toil, the yearly times set apart from the stormy stress 
of life, will be filled with natural piety and noble 
thought, with tranquillising research and joy, and the 
whole nature set a-growing naturally towards things 
which are of good report and of pure beauty. 

And it is the infinite importance of all % this which 
makes one indignant when at a cry of economy men 



A rt Expenditure. 



269 



would withdraw the flowers from the park, or reduce 
the sum doled out with reluctant distress by the State 
for the purchase of beautiful things or their preserva- 
tion. It is not even the Judas cry which we hear, it 
is not that this money is wanted for the poor : the poor 
speak plainly enough that they would rather have their 
flowers than their worth in money. But we spend 
thousands in diplomacy, the chief end of which appears 
to be not to settle international questions, but to 
arrange the quarrels of a few kings and queens and to 
sow the seed of future wars. ISTo one complains of this 
expenditure, but every year a number of blind persons 
start up to object to a grant to science or art. We put 
off year by year the building of a National Gallery to 
preserve and exhibit usefully priceless treasures, things 
which may speak to men's hearts when everything we 
are fighting about with such eagerness will have no 
power to interest anyone ; and we lavish millions on 
preparations for destroying our fellow-creatures, as if 
it were not true that if diplomacy were placed on a 
right basis and made, as it ought to be, a noble instead 
of a mean profession — international interests being the 
first instead of national ; the interest of the whole body 
of nations being felt to be the interest of each ; the 
personal interests of great personages being always 
placed below the interests of mankind ; the desire for a 
free interchange of all good things among nations being 
the main object, so that peace would grow out of the 
natural movement and play of every nation in and with 
its fellow, till Europe, Asia, and America formed one 
closely woven web — as if, if these things were done, we 



270 Art Expenditure. 

ought to have any war at all. If even the fourth part 
of our thirty millions were let loose for righteous and 
remedial work, what might we not do for our country ? 
We might then do our duty to the poor and the criminal 
without hearing the cry of Judas in our ears if we 
expended money on things which smooth and ennoble 
life. And the men who do the work of producing and 
teaching the beautiful, who toil apart that they may 
make new worlds for us and kindle creative emotion 
in our hearts, might live their lives without being 
tortured by the cries of starving men and ruined 
women ; without being troubled by the well-meaning 
but foolish persons who say to them : c Why is not 
your work sold for so much, and given to the poor ? ' 

Yes, we come back in the end to the other side of 
the question. I have pleaded the cause of the poets 
and the artists who teach men to see and feel the beau- 
tiful in nature and in the heart of man. I have asked 
that men who can do the work which produces a price- 
less harvest in the imagination and the soul, should 
be let alone and not worried out of it by those who 
think the visibly useful the only useful. But if they 
are to be let alone and to retain the peace of heart 
necessary for any great work, we, who cannot do their 
work, ought to do that which they cannot do, and 
which they would spoil if they tried. We ought to , 
prepare the way for their influence. Men cannot find 
pleasure in beautiful things, nor feel their power, 
as long as they are living like the brutes. We ought 
to clean London and the country ; to make dwellings 
in which men can live without the constant risk of 



Art Expenditure. 



271 



disease ; to secure that good food is sold ; to have 
everywhere pure water in plenty* 

You may not be able to apply yourselves directly 
to these things, and probably you would do them badly. 
But there are many young men among you who in one 
way at least may help towards work of this kind. By 
writing, by influence in and out of Parliament and in your 
business relations, you may work in many ways towards 
placing international relations on such a basis as will 
set, as I said, a large quantity of our military and naval 
money free for practical improvement of the country's 
welfare. The number who are doing that now might 
be counted in two minutes. I am sure no more Chris- 
tian work than that can exist, and if it is done heartily 
and with a genuine desire to help the race, it is well- 
pleasing to God. You will not see results now ; but 
what is man worth unless he has faith in the future, 
belief in principles, and sufficient courage to labour 
without always wanting like a child to grasp his result 
at once ? 

Another thing we may do. We may avoid all 
expenditure for -the sake of show, or for the sake of 
pushing our way into higher circles. We may deny 
ourselves the wretched pleasure of being pointed at as 
men and women who spend more than others in food, 
and dress, and luxuries. We may resolve to waste no 
more money on things which have no intrinsic value, 
whose value passes away in smoke. We may hate 
all gambling, betting, and all other ways of that kind 
in which wealth is consumed, avoiding all places 
where this unhallowed robbery of the country is carried 



272 



Art Expenditure. 



on. A few men and women in society who should mark 
their contempt and hatred of this waste, with the 
firmness of good taste, would begin the formation of 
a strong public opinion against these things, and 
render them in the end as shameful as they are. 
That is one way at least of serving God and following 
Christ, which is in the power of many among you. 

If these things were done, a quantity of capital would 
be set free which might be employed in practical and 
reproductive work. And the outward and visible wants 
being supplied, there will be room for well-educated 
expenditure on beautiful things which have a lasting 
value, and we may call upon the rich to spend large 
sums in promoting the higher educational wants of the 
country. I do not know what a man is a millionaire 
for, unless it is that he should undertake great public 
works for the nation. Once that was the case in 
England, it is continually the case in America. Here 
and there among our merchants there are men who 
found large libraries and public institutions. But 
one does not hear of men possessing almost fabulous 
property and who have a fashion of calling themselves 
poor, because they needlessly support a number of 
establishments, expending, as they ought to do, a year's 
income in the space of three or four years, and that not 
once but often in their lives, on some great public work. 
It is our colossal and hereditary fortunes who ought to 
build the National Gallery, who ought to endow science, 
who ought to establish libraries and art schools in every 
part of England ; who ought to found new colleges at 
Oxford and Cambridge for the poorer students ; who 



A rt Expenditure. 273 

ought to feel that overweening wealth can only be 
endured in the hands of private persons when a large 
public use is made of it. This would be the way to 
make a noble reputation, to hand down one's name, not 
as a by- word for extravagance or for parsimony, but 
blazoned with the gold of honour and bright with the 
tears of gratitude. 

And there are numberless things which men of lesser 
wealth, but with more than they have the right to 
spend upon themselves and their estates, may do which 
will help on the world far better than giving of alms. 
They ought to find out men who only want some help 
to make them useful to the world, and to put them for- 
ward in life. A few hundreds a year would have saved 
Keats for us as Calvert saved Wordsworth. It ought 
to be understood that money would be forthcoming 
whenever in the National Schools a boy rises so plainly 
above his fellows as to make it plain that the world 
would be the better for his liberal education. It should 
be part of the duties of the rich to search for such 
men. It should? be part of their duty to buy valuable 
things for the national collections, and they ought to be 
educated, as they are not, to know a first-rate thing 
when they see it. Why should public money be spent 
on a great picture, when there are five hundred men in 
England who could buy it and not know that they had 
bought it ? There are fifty other ways in which private 
purses can do public duties, but I cannot dwell upon 
them now. Let these things suffice. 

And to conclude all, it is not unfitting for a Christian 
minister to say that the work of artist and poet of 



Art Expenditure. 



which, wo have been speaking, and the work of those 
who, not being themselves prophets of the beautiful, 
yet labour to help those who are, is, as well as that of 
charitable giving, Christian work ; not unpleasing to 
the Father of all Light and the King in His Beauty, 
when its aim is not private ostentation but the desire 
to give men a noble pleasure and the welfare which 
comes through that. Be sure that expenditure for this 
purpose, though it may seem unproductive, is not un- 
productive ; nor will the Great Judge at the end sup- 
port the accuser who may say, like Judas, Why were .not 
these things sold for much, and given to the poor ? 



Child Life, 



275 



CHILD LIFE. 

1 Suffer little children come unto me, and forbid them not: for of 
&uch is ihe Kingdom of God.' — Luke xviii. 16. 

It is a liappy thought that the children who climb upon 
our knees are fresh from the hand of God, living bless- 
ings which have drifted down to us from the imperial 
palace of the love of God, that they still hear some of the 
faint notes of the music of God's life, still bear upon 
their faces traces of the uncreated light. Heathen sage 
and Christian poet have enshrined the thought, each 
according to his knowledge, and though there is no 
proof of its truth, yet we cannot neglect as quite 
fruitless in wisdom so wide-spread an intuition. It is 
vain to sneer at it as poetry, in vain at least for some 
of us. He cannot scorn this thought who feels, as his 
children's faces light up at his coming, not pleasure 
' only, but an inner sense of gratitude that things so pure, 
so close to God, should give to him, with the sense of 
his unworthiness deep within, so much and so unsus- 
pectingly. Their trust seems to carry with it something 
of the forgiveness of Heaven. The man sees the tole- 
rant tenderness of God his Father in the child whom 
He has sent him — that his little one believes in him, 
bestows on him the blessing of an ever-renewed hope* 



276 



Child Life. 



!N"or can he scorn this thought who on philosophic 
grounds believes that all living beings are held in God, 
are manifestations of part of the Divine thought. He 
knows that a phase of that idea which God has of the 
whole race is incarnate in his child, that his child is 
destined to reveal it, that this is the purpose for which 
God sent it into the world. Therefore hidden within 
this speck of mankind he recognises a germ of the 
Divine essence which is to grow into the harvest of 
an active life, with a distinct difference from other 
lives. 

And if, born of these two thoughts, a sadness succeeds 
the first touch of joy and gratitude, when the parents 
think how soon the inevitable cloud of life will make dim 
the heavenly light ; how long, how evil, may be the days 
of their child's pilgrimage ; how far he may retreat from 
God — yet, we who believe, not in a capricious idol of 
power, but in a just Father who loves — we who hold 
that there is nothing which is not in God, cannot dis- 
trust the end. Our children are in His hands; they 
will some time or other fulfil the work of revealing God; 
they must, for God does not let one of His-thoughts fail. 
If all life be in God, no life ever gets loose from God ; it 
is an absolute imperative of the philosophy which denies 
that anything can be which is not of God, that nothing 
can ever finally divide itself from Him. Our children, 
like ourselves, are already saved by right. Years of 
what we call time will be needed to educate them into 
union with God in fact, but that end is as certain, if 
God exist, as God's existence. 

This thought of what I may call the divinity of child- 



Child Life. 



hood is still further supported by the exquisite relation 
in which Christ put Himself to children. The heart 
of woman will never forget that beautiful wayside 
story where He consecrated the passion of motherhood. 
The religious spirit will never cease, when disturbed 
by the disputes of the worldlier life, to remember his 
words when, bringing the disciples back to the sweet- 
ness of early charity, He took a child and placed it in 
their midst. The soul distressed with questions of belief 
remembers with a touch of peaceful pleasure how Christ 
recalled his people to the natural simplicity of faith, to 
that higher and deeper religion which lives beyond the 
wars of the understanding, when He said, 6 Whoso shall 
receive one such little child in My name receiveth Me.' 

And when mistaken religious persons press hard upon 
the truth and tenderness of the relation of parents to 
children, and bid the one look upon the other as children 
of the devil— corrupting 1 with their poison the sweetest 
source of feeling in the world and the love which of all 
human love links us closest to the heart of God, we 
fall back in indignant delight upon the words of the 
Saviour : ' Take heed that ye despise not one of these 
little ones ; for I say unto you, that in heaven their 
angels do always behold the face of My Father which 
is in heaven.' 

And once more, when we think that God revealed Him- 
self in the childhood of the Saviour, the thought of the 
divinity of childhood becomes still more real. To us 
it is much, in our stormy and sorrowful s life, to think 
of Christ in his manhood conquering and being made 
perfect through suffering ; but when we wish to escape 



278 



Child Life, 



into a calmer, purer air, we turn from the image of our 
Master as c the man of sorrows and acquainted with 
grief,' dear as that is to us, and look with infinite 
pleasure .on the earlier days at Nazareth, imagine Him 
playing in the meadow and rejoicing in the sunlight and 
the flowers, taking his mother's kiss, and growing in 
the peace of love — and so learn to dream of God, re- 
vealed not only as the Eternal Father, but, in some not 
unworthy sense, as also the Eternal Child. 

It is a thought which bathes all our children in a 
divine light. They live for us in the childhood of 
Christ ; they move for us and have their being in the 
childhood of God. 

In the directest opposition to all this — to the poetic in- 
stinct of Greek and Christian poetry and philosophy, to 
the natural instincts of the human heart, to the teaching 
and acts of Christ, to the revelation of God in childhood 
— is the dreadful explanation which some have given of 
original sin. Children are born, we are told, with the 
consummate audacity of theological logic, under the 
moral wrath of God, are born children of the devil. I 
have already denied this from this place, and stated in- 
stead of it the fact — that we are born with a defective 
nature which may and does lead to moral fault, but in 
itself it is no more immoral than colour-blindness. I 
have said that this imperfectness is the essential differ- 
ence of human nature, that which makes man differ 
from God, from angels, from brutes ; that which makes 
him, so far as^we know, the only being in the universe 
capable of progress. It is a defectiveness distinctly 
contemplated, distinctly initiated by God, who wished 



Child Life. 



279 



for a being in His universe the history of which should 
be the attainment of perfectness through struggle 
against defectiveness. As such, the defectiveness of our 
children, as well as our own, has in it a thought which 
glorifies it. We see in its first developments, and in 
the way in which the spiritual element meets it, the 
beginning of that noble struggle in which the soul will 
have the glory and pleasure of advance, the delight of 
conquest as well as the misery of failure ; the interest 
of a great drama, and the final resurrection into freedom 
from weakness, error, and restraint. 

Whatever way we look, then, upon our children, our 
first feeling should be reverence for the divine within 
them, infinite desire to help them to recognise that 
divine idea, and to express it through life, in a noble 
form. This should be the basis of education. If it 
were, we should have less bad men and bad women. 

For we should remember that children on whom we 
can make almost any impression we please, so ductile is 
their wax, will become what they are believed to be, will 
reverence their own nature when they feel that it is 
reverenced, will believe that they are of God, and know 
and love Him naturally when they are told that God is 
in them. 

But the other basis of education has an irresistible 
tendency to degrade them, and it only shows how near 
they are to God that it does not degrade them more. 
What conceivable theory is more likely to make them 
false, untrustful, cunning, ugly-natured, than that which 
calls them children of the devil, and acts as if the one 
object of education was, not to develope the God within 



28o 



Child Life. 



them, but to lash the devil out of them ? Let them 
think that you believe them to be radically evil, and 
the consequences be on your own head. You will 
make them all you think them to be. Every punish- 
ment will make them more untrue, more fearful, more 
cunning 5 and instead of day by day having to remit 
punishment, you will have to double it and treble it, 
and at last, end by giving it up altogether in despair, or 
by making your child a sullen machine of obedience. 

Instead of trusting your child, you will live in an 
atmosphere of constant suspicion of him, always think- 
ing that he is concealing something from you, till you 
teach him concealment and put lies in his mouth and 
accustom him to the look and thought of sin ; and 
then — having done this devilish work and turned the 
brightness and sweetness of childhood into gloom and 
bitterness, and having trodden into hardened earth the 
divine germs in his heart — what happens ? You send 
him into the world already a ruined character, taught 
through you to live without God in his soul, without 
God in the world, to believe in evil and not in good. 

Do not complain afterwards if he disappoint you, if 
he turn out a cruel or a dishonourable, or a miserable 
man. It is you who have made him so, and God will 
have a dreadful reckoning with you. 'I mistook,' you 
will say, as you tremble before His judgment-seat ; ' I 
did it for the best.' Alas ! there will be no possible 
excuse for you, but this, which links you with the 
slayers of Christ, Father, forgive me, for I # knew not 
what I did.' 

Teach your child to believe in the goodness of his 



Child Life. 



nature, in his nearness to God. And this leads me to 
the first characteristic of childhood, faith ; faith, the 
quality whose outward form is trust. 

It speaks well for the beauty of the human quality 
of faitn that it is so lovely a thing to us when we see it 
pure in childhood. ~No pleasure is so great as that 
which we receive when, in their hours of joy, still more 
when sorrow or disease attack them, we see the light of 
our children's faith in us shining in their eyes. 

It speaks well for the spiritual power of this quality 
that it has on us such winning force. We grant to it 
as we recognise it, what we should grant to nothing 
else — we cannot hold back from its often mute request 
anything which is not wrong for us to give. It over- 
comes the world in us : it leads us to make a thousand 
sacrifices. It charms our weary life, it- attracts and 
softens our sated heart. It makes us feel our own 
relation to God, and what it should be, for it is its earthly 
image. The parents who have not encouraged and loved 
this quality in children towards themselves, will have 
but little of it in their own relation to God. They will 
give no pleasure to the Divine Father, they will have 
no natural power with Him. 

Having this faith, the child is, as long as it is un- 
spoilt by us, fearless, and fearless under the difficulties 
of a vivid imagination, not the high imagination which 
composes images towards an artistic end, but the un- 
tutored quality which works without an impulse or an 
aim. On the child's receptive heart everything makes 
a strong impression, numberless images are received. 
And at night, when no new impressions are made by 

13 



282 



Child Life. 



outward objects, these images rise tip a thronging crowd 
in the brain. And the work of the brain, just beginning 
to learn itself, and as yet under no ordinance of the 
will, composes, combines, contrasts these images into a 
thousand fantastic forms. 

Spoil the child's faith in the world being good to it 
and pleasant ; frighten it with falsehoods to keep it 
quiet, tell it a single lie, and let it lose a grain of its 
divine trust in jou ; show yourself violent, unreasonable, 
harsh, or cruel, and every one of these images may take 
a frightful form. What it has suffered from you, the 
distrust it has gained from you, will creep like a subtile 
element of fear into the creations of its fancy, and 
terror is born in its heart. 

Again, this unquestioning faith makes the child think 
that everything is possible^ and as many things are 
possible which the fear which reasons deters us from 
attempting, the child often does feats which astonish 
us. So nations in their childhood, and men inspired 
by intense faith, have believed in themselves and done 
things called miraculous. 

It is unwise to attack too rudely even this self-con- 
fidence of childhood. Lessen the child's faith in his 
own powers, and you will check the growth of that 
happy audacity which in boyhood and youth wins after- 
wards so much — that easy daring and self-confidence 
which, when it is limited by good manners, is so charm- 
ing in society. 

Nature herself will teach him humility soon enough, 
and you had better let him find out his limits in this 
direction for himself. She has a way of teaching which 



Child Life. 



283 



is irresistible ; which, though it stops audacity with firm- 
ness, } r et shows that she is pleased with the audacity ; 
which points out a way of conquering herself. And in 
the child's relation to his home and society, you yourself 
can check the fearless self-confidence when it degene- 
rates into impertinence or thoughtlessness, not by harsh 
rebuke, but by appealing to the natural impulse of 
affection. The limit placed by saying and enforcing this 
— 6 Do nothing, my child, say nothing, which will give 
pain to others ' — is not a limit which will crush the 
natural boldness of the heart. It is a limit which 
appeals to love, and the desire to be loved is an ele- 
ment in the child's nature as strong as faith. It will 
be seen to be natural and reasonable, it will be ac- 
cepted. 

Again, as to this faith in its relation to God, how 
does it take a religious form? The child's religious 
faith is, first, faith in you — mother, father, guardian ; to 
early childhood you are God. And when you come to 
give a name to the dim vision of the growing child, and 
call it God, it will grow into form before him, clothed 
with your attributes, having your character. If the 
child learn to worship an idol — a jealous, capricious, 
passionate God — it is not his fault half so much as yours. 
What were you to him when he was young ? Were you 
violent, sulky, exacting, suspicious, ruling by force and 
not by love ? W T hatever you were, his God in boyhood 
will wear your shape and bear your character, and he 
will grow like the character he contemplates. As he 
grows older, he needs more direct teaching. He asks 
who is God, what is His character, what His will. For he 



284 



Child Life. 



cannot but desire to know these things, through a vague 
curiosity, if through nothing more. For by and by, God 
touches him. Spiritual impulses, slight, but distinct, 
come to him in hours of temptation ; voices make them- 
selves heard in his heart ; passion renders life exalted, 
and in the more wakeful state it genders, the germs of 
spiritual life push forth ; nature speaks her dim message 
in. some lonely moment on the hills or in the wood, and 
he is conscious of an undefined want. What has he to 
fall back on then? What ideas have you given him to 
which he may now fly for solution of the growing pro- 
blem ? what forms of thought which the new powers 
of spiritual faith and love may breathe upon and make 
a living God ? The whole spiritual future of his youth 
then trembles in the balance. Fathers and mothers, you 
do not know often what you are doing ; what misery, 
what bitterness, what hardness of heart, what a terrible 
struggle, or what a hopeless surrender of the whole 
question you have prepared for your child by the dismal 
theology and the dreadful God, and the dull heaven, 
which you have poured into the ear of childhood. 
Long, long are the years, before the man whose early 
years have been so darkened can get out of the deadly 
atmosphere into a clear air, and see the unclouded face 
of God. 

So far for the faith of childhood ; on its love I need 
not dwell, the same things apply to it as apply to faith ; 
but on its joyfulness and the things connected there- 
with we speak as we draw to a conclusion. 

The child's joy comes chiefly from his fresh recep- 
tiveness. His heart is open to all impressions as the 



Child Life. 



285 



bosom of the earth, is to the heavenly airs and lights. 
Nothing interferes to break the tide of impressions 
which, roll in wave on wave — no brooding on the past, 
no weary anticipations of the future. He lives, like 
God, in an eternal present. The world is wonderful to 
him, not in the sense of awaking doubts or problems, 
but as giving every moment some miraculous and vivid 
pleasure, and it is pleasure in the simplest things. 
His father's morning kindness makes him thrill ; his 
food is to him the apples of paradise. The sunlight 
sleeping on the grass, the first fall of snow in winter, 
the daisy stars he strings npon the meadow, the fish 
leaping in the stream, the warm air which caresses his 
cheek, the passing of the great waggon in the street, the 
swallows' nest above his bedroom window, the hour of 
rest at night, and his prayer at his mother's knee — ■ 
all are loved lightly and felt keenly, and touch him 
with a poetic pleasure. And each impression, as it comes, 
is clothed in simple words — words which often, in their 
spontaneousness, their fearless unconsciousness, their 
popular quality, their fitness for music, have something 
of a lyric note, something of the nature of a perfect 
song. For the child lives in a world of unconscious 
art. He is fearless in his delight, and when he is 
happy he trusts his own instincts as revelations : and 
if we could get back in after-life something of this, we 
should all be artists in heart. One knows in the highest 
genius that, united with manhood's trained power of 
expression, there is an eternal element of childhood. 
Take, for example, the perfect song, such, as the songs 
of Shakespeare were. They were spontaneous, sudden, 



236 



Child Life. 



popular, simple, and able to be sung. But above all, 
they derive their magic and winning power from the 
poet's fearlessness, from his trust in, and his delight in 
his instinctive emotions. The songs of other poets are 
spoiled by their fear of their simplicity being called 
absurd by the public, by that doubt whether the thing 
is quite right, that thinking about thought, that shy- 
ness of one's own feeling which come from want of 
that unconscious trust in his rightness and delight in it 
which a child possesses. The kingdom of a perfect 
song, the kingdom of a perfect work of art, is like the 
kingdom of heaven, one must enter it like a little 
child. 

c Fostered alike by beauty and by fear/ fear which 
has its thrill of joy, the child grows into union with the 
world, and into consciousness of his own heart, till 
£ the characters of danger and desire 5 are impressed 
upon all outward forms, and day by day more vividly 
that great enjoyment swells which makes 

The surface of the universal earth 

With triumph and delight, with hope and fear, 

Work like a sea. 

And in quieter moments, calmer pleasures are his — plea- 
sures of love given and received, pleasures of childish 
friendship, pleasures of first successes in learning and 
in new pursuits, pleasures of obscure feelings just 
touched, not understood, which make in after-life 

Those recollected hours that have the charm 

Of visionary things, those lovely forms 

And sweet sensations which throw hack our life, 

And almost make remotest infancy 

A visible scene, on which the sun is shining. 



Child Life. 



287 



We look back 011 them with reflection, but there was 
no reflection, or but little, then ; the life was natural, 
unthoughtful, only now and then, amid the full move- 
ment of unconscious pleasure, flashes of deeper thought 
arose and passed away, a faint touch of something to 
come, a weight within the pleasure, a dim sense of 
sublimity or calm, a suspicion of what duty meant, 
just came and were forgotten, but did not die. They 
went to form the heart, to build up that which was to 
become the man, and they arose afterwards in maturer 
life to impregnate and to elevate the mind. 

We spoil all this divine teaching of God and nature 
by forcing the child out of his unconsciousness into 
self-consciousness, by demanding of him reflection, 
by checking the joy of his receptiveness by too much 
teaching, too much forcing. Let him remain for a 
time ignorant of himself, and abide in his heavenly 
Father's hands ; let him live naturally, and drink 
in his wisdom and his religion from the influences 
which God makes play around him. Above all, do 
not demand of him, as many do, convictions of sin, 
nor make him false and hysterical by calling out from 
his imitative nature deep spiritual experiences which 
he cannot truly feel. Let him begin with natural 
religion, leave him his early joy untainted, see that he 
knows God as love and beauty and sympathy. It is 
horrible to anticipate for him the days, soon enough 
to come, when sorrow and sin will make of life a 
battle, where victory can only be bought by pain. 

But if we keep these early days pure and joyful, full 
of the blessedness of uninjured faith and unconscious 



288 



Child Life. 



love, we give to the man that to which he can always look 
back with hope, and use for the kindling of effort and 
aspiration. For the dim remembrance of their pure 
and powerful pleasure, the divinity within them, have 
virtue to recall us in after-life, when high feeling is 
dulled with the cares of this world, to loftier and better 
thoughts ; to nourish and repair imagination when its 
edge is bkmted by distress and doubt; to exalt the 
soul with hope, that though innocence is lost, yet good- 
ness remains to be won 5 to tell us, in the midst of the 
transient and the perishable, that our life is hidden in 
God, and our spirit at home in immortality. 

It is true that inimitable innocence and fearlessness, 
that perfect trust, that belief that nothing is impos- 
sible, that fresh and honest freedom, that divine joy, 
cannot be the blessing of the man. He has been driven 
out of Eden, and the swords wave for ever over the gate 
and forbid return. But there is a nobler paradise 
before us, the paradise of the soldier spirit which has 
fought with Christ against the evil, and finished the 
work which the Father has given him to do. There the 
spirit of the child shall be mingled with the power of the 
man, and we shall once more, but now with ennobled 
passion and educated energies, sing the songs of the 
fearless land, children of God, and men in Christ. 

It is true* that, tossed with doubt, and confused with 
thoughts which go near to mastering the will, we are 
tempted to look back with wild regret to the days, 
when children, we dreamt so happily of God, and lived 
in a quaint and quiet heaven of our own fanciful crea- 
tion, and took our dreams for realities, and w$re happy 



Child Life. 



289 



in our belief. But after all, though, the simple religion 
is lost, its being now more complex does not make it less 
divine ; our faith is more tried, but it is stronger ; our 
feelings are less easily moved, but they are deeper; 
our love of God is less innocent, but how much more 
profound ; our life is not so bright in the present, but 
its future is glorious in our eyes. We are men who 
know that we shall be made partakers of the child's 
heart towards our Father, united with the awe and love 
and experience of the man. And then, through death, 
again we enter the imperial palace whence we came. 
We hear the songs and voices which of old we heard 
before we left our home, but we hear them now with 
fuller, more manly comprehension ; we see again the 
things which eye hath not seen, but our vision pierces 
deeper. We worship God with the delight of old, before 
we went upon our Wander-Tear, but the joy is more 
stately, for it is now the joy of sacrifice ; and all things 
now are new to us, for we have grown into men, and 
we feel the power and joy of progress. But never, as 
we look to Him who led us all our life long until this 
day, shall we lose the feeling of the child. Through 
all eternity the blessing of the child's heart shall be 
ours. In the midst of our swiftest work, in the midst 
of our closest pursuit of new knowledge, in the midst 
of all the endless labour and sacrifice of the heavenly 
life, we shall always turn with the sense of infinite 
peace to God, and say, Our Father, suffer a little child 
to come to Thee. 



290 Youth } and Us Questions To-day. 



[Jan. 1870.] 

YOUTH, AND ITS QUESTIONS TO-DAY. 

i Lo, I am with you alwa}', even unto the end of the world.' 
Matt, xxviii. 20. 

These are pictures which, to the very close of the 
artist's work, want a magic touch to make them perfect 
— one point of light, one spark of brilliant colour. At 
last the hour comes when all is finished but this. Its 
addition is not an after-thought ; one might say that 
the picture had been painted with the intention of it 
in the creator's mind. He adds it ; it is but a touch, 
but it transfigures and completes the work. 

Such a touch of finish is my text. All has been told 
of the Saviour's work— the lowly birth, the quiet ripen- 
ing years of youth, the entrance into the ministry, the 
redeeming, revealing ministry itself, the founding of 
the kingdom, the sacrificial death, the resurrection, the 
passing into glory, the mission of the disciples to the 
whole world — and yet the picture is incomplete. 6 Of 
what use,' we say, c is all this, if the revealer of God 
and the Saviour of men is gone away from his work 
and left it in our feeble human hands ? What beauty 
is there in a work which must perish, unsupported by 
the spirit of its author? The thing is incomplete.' 
At the very moment that we say this, as we read the 



You thy audits Questions To-day. 291 

gospel, Christ turns and adds the perfecting conception : 
4 Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the 
world.' 

6 The end of the world ! ' — what does it mean ? Lite- 
rally, the conclusion of the age, of this present time- 
world. There have been many theories with regard 
to the manner in which this conclusion will take place. 
But bound up with them all and almost up to the 
present day, one idea has been constant — the idea of 
a terrible catastrophe, in which the whole frame of 
things, with cities, nations, men, shall be dissolved in a 
fiery ruin, that out of the dissolution a new heaven and 
a new earth may be upraised. 

So constant and unquestioned was this idea, that 
it had an insensible influence on scientific theories, 
and the earlier geologists transferred to the past 
history of the globe the idea of catastrophes. It was 
said that each new series of life and strata had been 
ushered in by the total overthrow of the preceding. 

Historians shared in the same thought. States and 
their work, to theoretical eyes, seemed to be absolutely 
swept away. Assyria, Greece, Rome, perished and 
left no trace. Catastrophe, convulsion, almost anni- 
hilation, marked, they said, the history of earth and 
the history of man, and the theologians appealed in 
triumph to this as confirming their theory of the close 
of the world ; unaware, apparently, that it was their 
own idea, with which they had prejudiced the world, 
coming back to them again. 

But, within the last thirty years, an immense change 



292 Youth, audits Questions To-day . 

has taken place — a change of idea which has spread 
itself over nearly all the realms of human thought. 
The idea of uniform evolution has succeeded the idea 
of violent catastrophe. As geologists ceased to theo- 
rise, and looked closer into the history of the earth, 
the conjectured catastrophes faded away one by one. 
It was seen that one age slid slowly into another 
through insensible changes ; it was seen that the ani- 
mal life of the world altered its character even more 
slowly than the earth itself ; that there was no^ break ; 
that transition, instead of being exceptional, was the 
rule ; that there were, properly speaking, no transition 
periods ; that it was all transition. 

The same change of idea waited upon history ; na- 
tions, it was seen, when facts were examined, did not 
die suddenly, but decayed. The catastrophe, when it 
did take place, was the result of inward and slow 
disease, and did not at all produce annihilation. The 
elements of the fallen nation lived again in other 
forms, and entered into the new national life which 
rose over its ruins. Successive nations were like the 
succession of forests which we are told clothed Scandi- 
navia in the old days, passing, as the climate changed, 
from fir to oak, and from oak to beech. Each forest 
period was new and different from its predecessor, but 
each drew its life from the elements of the preceding. 

In the history of nations, as in the history of the 
earth, there were no violent transitions. It was seen 
that each historical era overlapped its successor, and 
modified it, and that new political systems arose, with 
a few exceptions, not only within but absolutely out of 



Youths audits Questions To-day. 293 

the old. Transition never ceased; it was the law, not 
the exception. 

And now, as a theological idea had insensibly in- 
fluenced history and science, these in turn have had 
their revenge, and their idea of slow evolution has 
insensibly entered into the region of theology. 

In most educated men's minds the expectation of a 
catastrophe of the vast character formerly believed 
in has utterly passed away. Mankind grows towards 
its close as the earth grows, as nations have grown ; 
and the close itself of this time- world will not be in a 
physical ruin, but in the perfection of the race through 
a slow evolution — on the whole uniform — during 
which the evil, worldly, and transitory elements will be 
gradually worked out. 

This is the theory, at least, which we embrace. At 
the same time, this theory does not shut out the possi- 
bility of a catastrophe or convulsion now and then 
occurring, just as we admit the fact of sudden con- 
versions like S. Paul's in the history of spiritual 
experience. Geologists allow temporary periods of 
convulsionary action during which rapid changes took 
place in the crust of the earth. Historians cannot 
deny that there are instances where nations have sunk, 
as it were, like ships in a hurricane, and left scarcely a 
rack behind. And it seems true that the slow progress 
of the race wants now and then, as our own personal life 
does, a kind of catastrophe to turn up to the surface 
elements belonging to mankind which have sunk out 
of use. 

So, taking in all these conditions, we see the human 



294 Youths audits Questions To-day. 

race going on to an end which is not destruction but 
perfection. There has been continual change, generally 
slow, rarely rapid ; but on the whole, as we look back, 
we see growth, not decay, ruling in the history of the 
race. A Divine Spirit has been living in the world, and 
will move in it till the close come. It is He who said : 
6 Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the 
world. 5 

We may live in a time when evolution is more than 
commonly rapid ; or in a time when the world is resting 
in a kind of Sabbath of progress ; or in a time of cata- 
strophe ; or when two periods are mingled together, the 
old overlapping the new. But in whichever stage we 
live — and each has its own dangers to our spiritual life, 
the danger of over-excitement in the first, of inactivity 
of soul in the second, of despair of heart in the third, of 
confusion of thought in the last, where the mingling of 
two periods produces that clashing of opinions in which 
the delightful sense of the constancy of truth is lost — 
in whichever period we live, our strength in one and all, 
our shield against their dangers, is faith in this pro- 
mise of Christ, and the boundless hope and kindling 
impulse in it : 6 Lo, I am with you alway ; even unto 
the end of the world.' 

We ourselves live in a time which is called a time of 
transition, when the old thoughts of men are contending 
in a sharp battle with the new — so sharp, that the very 
outsiders and camp-followers of the armies of the world, 
the idle men and women, take an interest and engage 
themselves therein in a desultory manner. Men and 
ideas astonish and confuse us. 



Youth, and its Questions To-day . 295 

Men of whom we thought little step forward, and, by 
force of a strong conviction, take a prominent place. 
Men of low intellect, but of great enthusiasm, gain 
power. Men whom we trusted as leaders slide back, 
afraid of the plnnge. Men who led our youth, now 
grown too old to accept the new results of the ideas 
they have helped to sow, are content to remain fixed 
in a mould which, once capable of expansion, is now 
hardening around them. Men who were our ideals, 
who have given us impulse and hope, disappoint us. 
Fear or the world touches them, or weaknesses, which 
had lain latent in their character, arise and taint their 
purity of purpose. There is no certainty, it seems, 
in men. We become distrustful and indignant. But 
it is because we look to men too much, and have not 
faith in the man Christ Jesus. It matters after all 
but little how men deceive us. "We have one Leader 
who never disappoints, to whom truth is as dear now 
as it was to Kim on earth, who encompasses our failure 
with his success, our weakness with his strength, our 
restlessness with his rest, and lo ! He is with us 
always, even to the eud of the world. 

Ideas trouble ns even more than men. We are 
hemmed in with a crowd of them, all jostling, fighting 
with one another, and in the mellay we cannot quite 
distinguish under what banner to array ourselves. 
There are ideas, half of the old, half of the new theo- 
logy, half marble, half living men, like the prince in 
the Arabian story ; and others struggling out of the 
soil of perished thoughts, like the dead in Tintoret's 
6 Last Judgment.' There are religious ideas borrowed 



296 You thy audits Questions To-day. 

from Christianity but which deny Christianity. There 
are ideas which have all hut died, but which are 
making a last fight for life ; there are others just born, 
which as yet have only interested a few men — and we 
are in the midst of it all, seeing much we once believed 
overthrown, and not able as yet to comprehend the 
new, so that in the noise and mist of the battle, like 
that last fight of Arthur's beside the Northern Sea, 
there is 

Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought ; 

For friend and foe were shadows in the mist, 

And friend slew friend, not knowing whom he slew ; 

And some had visions out of golden youth, 

And some beheld the faces of old ghosts 

Look in upon the battle. 

It is hard in a e dim, weird battle ' like this to discover 
and choose the leading thoughts, whose lights will burn 
with self-increasing fire, when the fight is over and the 
mist floats away to the west to die in the daylight of 
God. An angry feeling, like that of Hamlet, of a duty 
laid on us too great for our energy, comes upon our 
heart. It is the anger of weakness, 6 Why are we born 
in such evil times ? Why are we called upon to seek, 
to choose, to distinguish true from false forms of 
truth ? Why have we no peace at heart ? 5 These 
thoughts are bitter in hours of depression, when illness 
besets, or life has for a time gone wrong, and then, 
being natural and transient, they are not undignified. 
But if they are continued, if they are kept as the sour 
food which we give the soul at all times, they are 
unworthy of man and woman. They enslave more 
rapidly than any other thoughts the free life and 



Youth, and ils Questions To-day. 297 

natural movement of the heart and spirit. They injure 
the will, so that it becomes wavering, the victim of 
passing thoughts and morbid feelings. 

It is then that, remembering our worth as soldiers 
of mankind, and of mankind made divine in Christ, 
we should resolve, come what will, to contend with our 
difficulty till we disentangle truth, till we find the 
sunlight. And if we do not see our way, if the gloom 
be too thick for striking, and the noise too loud for 
thought, it is our wisdom to wait with patience till there 
be sufficient light for action, nor yet to wail over our 
fate because we are forced to wait — for more of prac- 
tical strength, of that latent power which multiplies 
from itself, comes from restrained endurance than from 
loosened action. 

These thoughts beset us now, when a natural in- 
stinct makes us pause to consider human life. And 
from the large and abstract thoughts we sweep back 
to ourselves and look upon our personal life. We are 
like men, to-day, who have just crested a ridge in a 
mountain journey. Behind us is the valley of the past 
year ; before is another valley and another ridge, over 
which our path lies this coming year. We rest upon 
the summit for retrospect and prospect, for contempla- 
tion and for hope. 

We look back. We have had our catastrophes ; our 
hours of rest ; our awakenings at the touch of new 
thoughts or the advent of new friends ; our secret bitter- 
ness, our hours of loneliness, perhaps of despair ; our 
visions of ideal joy; hopes too wild for fulfilment, but 
which left their sting of pleasure ; efforts after noble 



298 Youth, audits Questions To-day. 

ends which, failed, but whose failure, since the aim was 
so divine, has done our hearts more good than many a 
poor success ; sins which, as we look back, seem to have 
left an indelible stain upon our lives. Thoughts, feel- 
ings, events crowd upon our memory. We have scarcely 
breath for quiet thought. 

There is one question which we must ask ourselves, 
and force the heart into sufficient calm to answer. Has 
there been growth ? If so, catastrophes of heart or life, 
sorrows, sins and failures, are practically nothing in the 
balance. They are dead ; let the dead bury their dead. 
We have the right in Christ to shake them off and start 
afresh. The serpent does not keep the fragments of 
his old skin hanging about his new enamel. No more 
should we. If we feel that we have gained even one new 
impulse towards good, that even one sin is weaker than 
it was, we are licensed to claim forgiveness ; and God 
loves the faithful violence which claims it and in the 
claim gains life enough to begin again. 

True, we may not be able to distinguish growth. Our 
eyes have too many tears in them to see clearly, our 
vision of the past is too close to allot to things their true 
proportion. For we cannot see after one year the growth 
of the oak, we only see the scars where some great 
boughs have been torn away by the tempest. But the 
thin ring of bark which we do not see is the important 
matter, the riven branches are unimportant in com- 
parison. 

And if Christ's spirit has been with us even in one 
additional aspiration which has led to action, then it 
is faithlessness and cowardice to sit down upon the 




Youth) audits Questions To-day. 299 

ridge and wring our hands over the past. Out of that 
nothing ever comes ; but out of faith and the effort of 
the soul, and 6 no continuance of weak-mindedness/ 
arises the strong, if tearful, resolution to go forward 
trusting in the strength and forgiveness of Him who 
is with us always, even to the end of the world 

It may be, however, that other elements have come 
into our life which give us real reasons for dismay. 
There are times when a strange thing happens to us — 
when old evils, old temptations which we thought we had 
conquered, which had died out of our lives, arise again, 
and we tremble with the thought that past effort has 
been in vain, that sins cannot have been forgiven 
because they appear again. 

But there may be an explanation even of this. I 
cannot but think; that it is not always a note of retro- 
gression, but often a note of growth. First, it is not 
an experience which comes to unaspiring spirits. It 
belongs especially to those who are possessed with the 
desire to advance ; to pass beyond the bounds of mortal 
thought and find the fount of Truth. The very fact 
that we are conscious of it, and feel its bitterness, 
proves that the soul is sensitive and on the watch ; and 
such a soul cannot be going backwards. It will gird 
up its loins for battle, and disperse these foes. They 
have been already beaten ; they will fly again before 
spiritual courage. 

Again, this resurrection of evil things and thoughts 
may in itself be caused, not by any cessation of 
growth, but by the progress of growth itself. When a 
field has been well cleared, and the upper soil purified^ 



300 Youth y and its Questions To-day. 

it will produce but a few weeds. But if in after-years 
the plough is driven deep through it and the under soil 
upturned, old weeds will reappear. Their latent seeds 
are nourished into life by the sunlight and the rain. 
It is the same with us. If a catastrophe of sorrow has 
come in the past year and upturned the foundations of 
life — if a new idea, or a change in the circumstances 
of existence, has shaken or torn up our inner life — 
we must expect that old evils and old temptations will 
startle us by their resurrection, just as in a nation's 
revolution, evils which had seemed dead arise for a 
time again. But they arise because the soil has been 
upturned, they arise because a revolution has taken 
place, they arise because there is life enough in the 
soul not to be content with old things, even though the 
peace of them was pleasant. They mark the beginning 
of a new era of progress, destined, by its own rush of 
novel life, to extinguish the last remnants of these 
evils and to be triumphant, if we have faith and courage, 
to say, and act upon our speech, ' Lo ! He is with me 
always, even to the end of the world.' 

Once more. It is becoming the fashion among persons 
who take one-sided opinions from science, and talk of 
law without investigating the operation of nature, to 
say, that there is no such thing as forgiveness of sins, 
no healing for error. It is the gospel declaration, its 
first and last declaration, that sins are forgiven ; and 
instead of being a declaration belonging only to Chris- 
tianity, -it is supported by observation of nature, by 
the history of science, by the history of the world, by 
the experience of men. Only, the forgiveness is- not 



Youth, audits Questions To-day. 301 

the annihilation of the sin, it is its transmutation ; it 
does not arise out of ignoring, but out of accepting its 
existence, out of looking it firmly in the face, and 
resolving to use it as a means of conquering itself. 

We see forgiveness in nature. She redeems her evil 
when she makes fertile soil from the ashes of the vol- 
cano, and covers her ruin with meadow, flowers, and 
vines. Her prodigal effort creates new beauty out of 
her devastation, and the beauty is richer for the evil, 
and by the evil. The hurricane has laid waste the 
forest, but it is only the decaying trees and those whose 
lofty and overarching heads shut out the light which 
perish. A few years after, the pardon of nature fills the 
rents of ruin with young plants, rejoicing in the air and 
the light. The running fire has devoured the prairie, 
it lies before us a coal-black plain. Next year it is of a 
fresher green, the flowers have livelier hues. The roots 
were untouched, the rain has washed into the earth the 
carbon and nitrogen, and the bounteous forgiveness of 
nature has made a lovelier life out of the very elements 
of her unkindness. 

But as this analogy is open to attack, let us take 
another. The history of science is the history of ex- 
hausted errors. One after another their impossibility 
was demonstrated. All the mistakes possible to be 
made with regard to the system of the universe were 
made. Were they unforgiven ? They were necessary 
steps in the progress of knowledge ; one after another 
they were found out, and their forgiveness was secured 
when men, having experienced and rejected all the 
errors, rested securely in the truth. The same law 



302 Youth, and its Questions To-day. 

holds good in the history of national progress. Nations 
advance through exhausting errors, and, as they find 
•them out, paving with them the path of their progress, 
till full forgiveness is realised in the attainment of 
true forms of government. But the true was found 
only through knowing and conquering the false. 

To come to the experience of men. Who are the 
men who succeed in a noble manner, who influence 
the nation's heart, who advance her commerce, who 
rule her thought ? They are those who can rise out of 
failure and shake it off; who when they err, accept 
their error, and say, 6 Now I know where I am we ale, 
that I will never do again ; ' who look their sin straight 
in the face, and say, ' It is bad and vile, but it can 
be redeemed by effort, lived down by perseverance in 
good ; ' who do not despair and hide their face in a 
cowardly remorse, but who believe that the world for- 
gives sins if it sees determined action towards their 
opposite; who make their mistakes, their failures, the 
stepping-stones to their success. 

And shall we, because we have laid hold of half a 
truth, that results cannot be changed, forget the other 
half — that if we change, results, though remaining the 
same, change to us ? — shall we in our spiritual life deny 
the lesson of nature, and of history, and of human life, 
and fold our hands and say, 6 There is no forgiveness 9 ? 

It is true, as they say, that results cannot be changed ; 
that they follow upon sins by unalterable law. But 
the forgiveness of sins is not in taking away punish- 
ment, but in changing the heart with which we meet 
punishment. Everyone knows in life how different are 



Youth, and its Questions To-day. 303 

the effects of suffering when it conies on us from one 
we hate or from one we love. When we are angry with 
God, the natural results of our sins produce in us 
hardness, hatred, and misunderstanding of Him. But 
when we are led to love Him, the same results, not 
changed in themselves, but changed to us, for we are 
changed, lead us to penitence, to love of God, to cast 
our care and life upon Him. That is forgiveness of 
sins. Their moral burden is removed, and their in- 
evitable results become means of good. 

Moreover, everyone knows that there is such a thing 
as forgiveness. We have the word, we use it day by 
day ; is there no fact which answers to it ? Friends 
have forgiven us our wrongs to them, and greater love 
has followed on forgiveness. We forgive our children, 
even when they sting us most bitterly ; and does God 
never rise to the height of the human nature He has 
made ? Is the Father's charity below the children's ? 

Therefore, I say, because we may redeem the past in 
Christ, let us go forward with the patience and effort of 
men. We will not despair while we are wise, nor let 
the soul in utter faithlessness commit the sin of Judas. 
God is mightier than our evil, too loving for our sins. 
We shall be punished, but healed through the punish- 
ment. 

Again, we turn and look upon the valley of the past 
year. There, below, are the spots stained by our evil 
and our fear. But as we look, a glow of sunshine 
breaks upon the past, and in the sunshine is a soft rain 
falling from the heaven. It washes away the stain. 
The spell is broken which kept us weeping on the ridge. 



304 Youth, and its Questions To-day. 

The phantom cloud of sins, errors, failures, melts away 
in the growing light, and from the purity of the 
upper sky a voice seems to descend and enter our 
sobered heart : 6 My child, go forward, abiding in faith, 
hope, and love ; 5 for e lo, I am with you alway, even 
unto the end of the world. 5 



Youth, and its Hope of Progress, 305 



[Jan. 1870.] ' 
YOUTH, AND ITS HOPE OF PROGRESS. 

( Lo ; I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.' 
Matt, xxviii. 20. 

We stood last Sunday on the ridge which divides the 
valley of the old year from the valley of the new. To- 
day we have passed away from the summit and begun 
the unknown descent. Every step brings us and the 
nation and the world into a new position, into scenes 
similar, it may be, to those we have passed by, but 
never identical. It was right the last time we met here 
to look back, that we might gather into a practical 
form the experiences and lessons of the vanished year. 
It is equally right now to look forward, that we may 
understand our feelings, clear our hopes from errors, 
and muster the armies of the soul in disciplined array 
for action. We have indulged ourselves enough in 
retrospect. While we are as yet upon the upper ledges 
of the hills, we will indulge ourselves in prospect. But 
we cannot see clearly ; the mist closes and opens in 
the vale below. Strange voices come up to us from 
the world beneath, phantom tones of weeping and of 
mirth ; notes whose sound we do not know, of friends 
whom we shall make in the coming journey, of events 
H 



306 Youth, and its Hope of Progress. 

which will alter the movement of life, of passions as yet 
unstirred within us which, may waken into being. 
Mystery lies npon the future, but mystery has its charm 
as well as its pain, and conjecture its subtile delight as 
well as its delicate dread. 

To what are we descending ? Whom shall we meet in 
the path ? What joy to transfigure life, what sorrow to 
paralyse it, shall we encounter? These are questions 
which the soul insists on forming, but which it fears to 
form. We are tempted to lie down and rest, to shut 
down the lid of life, to quench aspiration because of its 
trouble, and thought because of its weariness. 

Let us alone, what pleasure can we have 
To war with evil ? Is there any peace 
In ever climbing up the climbing wave ? 

But the soul, mindful of the imperial palace whence 
it came, indignantly denies the lotus-eater's thought. 
Christ speaks in our spirit and echoes the denial, too 
weak, perhaps, to last when unsupported. There falls 
upon our ears the promise which brings Divine strength 
to human feebleness : 6 Lo, I am with you alway, even 
unto the end of the world.' 

Of our own personal looking forward and its aims I 
do not speak to-day. Our subject is, how, and to what 
we should look forward over the world of men. 

To whom was the promise given ? — that is a question 
which will clear our way. It was given to the nucleus 
of the infant Church, the eleven Apostles of Christ. 
But — and this is the point — it was given not to them 
alone, but to all men in them. For they held their 
apostolic office as representatives of the race ? not as 



Youth, and its Hope of Progress. 307 

persons divided from the race. They were men whose 
work was to hand on their apostleship, till by apostolic 
work there should be no further need of apostles ; just 
as government is to be transmitted till, by just laws 
and wise execution of laws, there is no further need of 
government. They were privileged for the purpose of 
destroying privilege. They were chosen out of man- 
kind in order that all mankind might be included in 
their number. 

So the promise is to them, and in them to the whole 
race. The moment they or any of their followers lost 
sight of this, and claimed the promise as especially or 
only theirs — claimed the privilege it gave of minister- 
ing to men as a privilege which gave them the power 
of lording over men, claimed it as isolating them 
into a class apart from men, claimed it as giving a 
right, and not as imposing a duty — that moment it was 
taken away from them till they repented, that moment 
their use decayed and they were turned into a curse. 
They were blessed and a blessing only when they came 
like the Son of Man, not to be ministered unto, but 
to minister, as sons of men, not as lords of men. 

c Lo, I am with you alway,' was said by repre- 
sentative Mankind to the mankind He represented. 
And this is in accordance with a theory I have 
frequently laid down. Not certain portions of mankind 
were taken by Christ into the Divine nature, but the 
whole. When the universal Word entered into man, 
He could not take only any particular manhood into 
Himself. That which He took must be as universal as 
the thing taken could be by its "nature. There was a 



308 Youth, mid its Hope of Progress. 

necessity, which I might almost call logical, of the 
Divine Word assuming to Himself, not a manhood, 
but mankind. Christ is then Humanity. His being is 
bound up with mankind's, or rather, mankind's in Him. 
Hence it is with a kind of horror that we hear any 
limitation of this promise, and with righteousness that 
we hate the opinions of those who claim it as alone 
their own. For it is an attack upon the entireness of 
Christ. If He is not with all Mankind even to the 
end of the world, He is not with Himself. 

But if He be with mankind as He is with Himself, 
present through and in the ages as their heart and 
brain, then He is the source whence evolution flows. 
And because He is perfect, therefore the race evolves 
towards perfection, and evolution towards perfection is 
progress. We look forward, then, as Christians, and as 
citizens of the world, to the constant progress of man- 
kind. We believe that the progress has been constant 
up to the present time. There have been, necessarily, 
some catastrophes, some convulsions, some recessions 
of the tide ; but they were recessions which sent the 
wave of freshening liberty higher on the strand. 

It is characteristic of some religious persons who re- 
' strict the universality of Christ, to deny that there has 
been any progress of the race. 6 The world is not a bit 
better than it was ; if anything, it is worse. There is 
great material and intellectual progress, but there is no 
moral or spiritual progress.' 

But when we examine the progress of the whole of 
mankind, we must examine not facts occurring here and 
there, for these are of little moment, but the ideas which 



Youth, and its Hope of Progress. 309 

direct the nations ; not the petty perturbations of the 
orbit,- but the vast sweep of the orbit itself ; not the 
advance or the contrary of a year or a decade, but 
whether in so many centuries men have attained to a 
higher sphere of thought and act, in mass, on larger 
and freer principles. 

It is impossible to bring forward one half of the proofs 
of such a progress, but one is enough. It is plain to 
those who read history more for the sake of human ideas 
than for its statistics, that many of the ideas which 
restricted the equal freedom of men, which implicitly 
denied the two great universal ideas of Christianity, 
that all men are alike God's children, that all men are 
brothers in Christ, have been slowly dying away and are 
now rapidly dying. In the decay of these, progress 
is seen; in looking forward to their ruin is our best 
hope ; in proving that their ruin is contained in 
Christianity is the reconciliation between the world 
and Christianity. And, in fact, the whole current of 
history has set against them ; the force of God in man 
is opposed to them. They are sinking ships. Some 
have already sunk, and the waves of human freedom 
have rolled over them with joy. The moment Christ 
proclaimed the oneness of the race, their doom was 
sealed, but not accomplished. Their final overthrow 
was left to the slow work of man, century after century. 

Some ask, why God did not get rid of these evils 
by an exercise of omnipotence. It is a foolish ques- 
tion. There is only one way in which man can get 
rid of an evil, and that is by exhausting it. We can- 
not get the answer to our question, 'What is right ?' till 



3io Youth, and its Hope of Progress. 

we have held fast and battled with the Proteus of evil 
through every alteration of his form. We must work 
through all possible errors before we find the perfect 
good. But we should exhaust them much sooner if 
we held fast to the primary ideas which Christ gave 
to men. I do not think that anyone can now deny 
that the ruin of such ideas as the divine right of kings, 
privileged classes, imperialism, dogmatism and its child 
intolerance, the tyranny of priesthoods over the souls of 
men, papal infallibility, the godhead of capital, is logi- 
cally contained in the doctrines of the universal Father- 
hood of God and the universal brotherhood of man. 
There is no need of peculiarly sharp eyes to see that 
these have been perishing, and one of the things we have 
to look forward to with joy and triumph in the coming 
year is new blows being dealt upon them — honest, 
downright, and, I hope, merciless blows. Imperialism 
is becoming weaker and weaker, and with its fall 6 di- 
vine right 5 will receive a deadlier stroke than we may 
at first imagine. There is less dogmatism and intole- 
rance in religious circles, and they are trying now to find 
a home in irreligious circles. Few things are worse 
than the dogmatism of those who boast of being undog- 
matic and the intolerance of those who want to make 
everybody tolerant by violence of words and bitterness 
of satire. The way in which young atheism speaks of 
the 4 old religions 5 has a delicious twang of Phari- 
saism about it and a naivete of intolerance which is 
irresistibly humorous. But I hope that by falling back 
on Christianity we may work out of society the in- 
tolerance of pretentious tolerance and the dogmatism 



Youth, anoints Hope of Progress. 3 1 1 

of infidel circles of thought. This ought to be the 
work of the liberal church school. 

Priest power over the souls of men never reached 
in England the same height that it has done abroad. 
The disease came sooner to the surface on the Continent, 
and in Germany, Austria, Italy, and Spain, its race seems 
to be run. Here, not having exhausted all its forms 
so rapidly, it has suffered a galvanic resurrection ; but 
as soon as we have ahsorbed into society the good ele- 
ments in its evil, it will go back to its grave and lie there 
undisturbed. In Ireland it is worse than ever, but the 
worse it grows the nearer draws its end. All tyranny is 
doomed by its very nature to become more tyrannical, 
and in that lies latent its destruction. Mankind, like 
God, is very long-suffering, but when a certain point is 
reached, it rises and casts the devil out of its body. When 
priestly power in Ireland meddles with education and 
limits its further growth, the Irish, who have a passion 
for education, will at last arise and do as Austria has 
done. It may take ten, twenty, or thirty years, but 
who cannot foresee the end ? 

Papal infallibility will receive its death-blow on the 
day that it is proclaimed, and I hope it may be pro- 
claimed. There are some victories which are irreme- 
diable ruin. 

Privileged classes, whose claims are so tenacious of life 
a,broad, but which were always healthily opposed here, 
and many of which are now being heartily surrendered, 
will less and less press their demands and throw them- 
selves on an equal footing with other classes into the 
arena of life. And this will be their wisdom, for the 



3 1 2 Youth, and its Hope *of Progress. 

history of privilege is trie history of the destruction of 
those who claimed it. There is one privilege, however, as 
rampant as ever. It is the privilege some assume to 
themselves of living a life of mere amusement, while the 
rest of the world is working. They lounge, they visit 
one another, they gossip, they drift uselessly about, they 
claim the right of being served and not serving, of taking 
and not contributing. They are the worst thieves the 
world has, and the worst tyrants. For they rob the world 
of the leisure which would be saved were they to do 
their work, and of the capital which might be made 
productive did they not squander it, and theirs is the 
true maxim of all tyrants : c The world was made for us, 
and not we for the world.' 

It is their lives which give sharpness and poison to 
all the bitter feelings which the poorer have against 
the richer classes. 

Against all these things the first principles of Christ 
are contending ; and they shall conquer, for He is with 
mankind, even to the end. 

This is the progress we look forward to, and when men 
begin to understand that this is the work of Christ's 
thought, they will turn to Him not only as Master of 
souls, but as King of nations. 

It is useless to object that Christianity has been the 
hireling of these retrograde and deathful things. 
Everyone knows the uses to which priests and kings 
and mobs have put Christianity ; but they were obliged 
to travesty it first, and it is gross injustice to call these 
travesties Christianity. It marks that unfairness of 
intellect which is the characteristic note of intolerance. 



Youths and its Hope of Progress. 313 



Truth is a good thing, but if a man of ill-temper sets 
himself to tell everyone truly what he thinks of them, 
to expose all their failures, to lay bare all their wounds, 
that sort of truth is a hateful thing. But we do not 
cease for all that to reverence truth, because this per- 
secuting person has caricatured it. And when we have 
got to think for ourselves, and ceased to put our reli- 
gion into the hands of persons whom we get to make 
it up for us into a system which we swallow whole, 
we may have the common sense and the fairness to 
say, c I want to find out for myself what Christ really 
did say. I will listen no more to the scholars and 
their Christianities which they set up to fight with one 
another. I will go and listen to the Master Himself, 
and cc learn of Him, for He is meek and lowly of heart, 
and I shall find rest to my soul.' " Why, is it not 
wonderful how a single text like that — falling like 
dew upon the land of the heart, swept dry and tearless 
by the bitter winds of controversy — disposes at once of 
all the attacks made upon Christianity, by proving 
that these haughty and tyrannical Christianities were 
not Christianity at all ? When were they meek and 
lowly of heart ? — when did they ever give rest to the 
soul ? 

And it is a proof of the intense vitality of the true 
Christianity that it has survived all these false images 
of it, that in the midst of systems diametrically contra- 
dictory of the idea of its Founder, thousands lived 
divinely and died bravely by the faith they had in 
Christ. In the midst of difficulties such as no other re- 
ligion had to contend with, difficulties which came from 



314 Youth) and its Hope of Progress. 



monstrous and misshapen changelings which claimed 
to be the true children of Christ's teaching, it produced 
such a band of holy and human men that, with every- 
thing apparently against it, it has advanced, and in. 
it the world. It presses still forward, clothed with 
many of the rags with which men have insisted on dis- 
guising its perfect form, and the dogs still bay around 
it and tear at the ragged drapery, but the time will 
come when we shall see it undisguised, clothed only 
in the light of God, in perfect beauty ; and 6 at the name 
of Jesus every knee shall bow.' 

What are all these particular religions to its vast 
universality? What are these laborious and subtile 
systems to its profound simplicity? What are all 
theories of government of the people to its divine 
Humanity, which embraces every man, without respect 
of persons, in the limitless love of God the Father, 
and knits each man to his neighbour in the universal 
brotherhood of Christ, and passes on to say, with an 
onward look to something not realised as yet, that a 
national God exists no longer, but a universal God? 
The true progress of the race is hidden in the thoughts 
of Christ. 

We look forward, then, upon this c bank and shoal of 
time,' to the destruction of all false conceptions of the 
relations of God to man and of man to man; to the 
hail which will sweep away the lingering remnants of 
every idea which limits, isolates, and tyrannises over 
men. For the Redeemer is with us always — even to the 
end of the world. 

But we must not expect that this will be done quickly 



Youth, and its Hope of Progress. 3 1 5 

or easily. In the midst of evolution catastrophes will 
occur — are, in fact, part of progress, inasmuch as they 
turn up to the surface new and needful elements. 
Sometimes, when the evil is deep and long-continued, 
and especially when it is painted by hypocrisy to look 
like good, the forward step cannot be made without the 
sun being turned into darkness. We have learned from 
Trance last century, and from America in this, that 
c without shedding of blood there is no remission of sin.' 
We are ourselves learning in Ireland that we cannot 
reverse the injustice and oppression of centuries — with 
the best intentions in the world — in forty or fifty years ; 
that the attempt to heal aggravates for a time the evil, 
and produces a period of partial catastrophe. But, 
whatever happens, we must not be fearful and unbeliev- 
ing, and turn round upon our principles because their 
result has surprised some of us. We have but two 
things to live by, if we are to be true to Christ — that 
G od is the Father of all men, and that men are brothers 
in Christ ; and our work, to which we are bound to be 
faithful unto death, is to carry those out as logically as 
we can — consistently with the necessary gradualness of 
progress — in national government and in international 
politics as well as in the inner kingdom of the soul. 
We may be obliged to stay our hand, but never to retreat 
from our position. We have precedent for the one — 
< I have many things to say to you, but ye cannot bear 
them now ' — but there is no precedent for the other. 
No matter how loud the storm, or the confusion, we must 
not give back through a shameful fear of catastrophe. 
The disturbance we dread may be the very thing 



3 1 6 Youth, and its Hope of Progress. 

required to bring to the surface the elements needed 
to regenerate the country. 

The same things are true in the case of the religious 
ferment of which I spoke last Sunday and in the seeth- 
ing midst of which we live. Look boldly into it, and 
you will see that it tends to two things especially, — the 
claiming by men of their personal rights as sons of 
God and brothers one of another, independent of all 
religious systems which assert a divine right to peculiar 
privileges ; the claiming by men of their duty to pursue 
after truth whithersoever it may lead them, without any 
limitation being fixed on the work of their intellect and 
conscience except that which is supplied, not from with- 
out by command of a church or a sect, but from within, 
by the intuition and feelings of their spirit. 

But he who makes these claims must expect to get 
into troubled water. It is a very different thing to 
seek after God for yourself, and to take your God upon 
authority. You may have a comfortable life of it, 
though a degrading one, with the latter ; you will have 
a very hard life of it with the other, but it will be the 
ennobling life of a warrior. And if you choose the 
noble life, there ought to be no continued complaining. 
Moments of depression there must be, moments when 
the noise of the contest and the confusion of doubtful 
thoughts bring with a sense of despair a passionate 
cry for rest, but we must not loiter long in that sickly 
state. If we have chosen to be free, we must act like 
freemen; we must not be slaves to our fear of cata- 
strophe, or slaves to our spiritual sloth. We musi go 
forward into the strife, uplifting our souls to God in 



Youths and its Hope of Progress. 3 1 7 

prayer, trusting in the promise that though the stress 
is hard, He is with us always. 

Let no man or woman think, who is still young, on 
whom the necessary calm of age has not fallen, that 
they will have a quiet life, if they are in earnest, for 
many years to come, either in the world without or in^ 
the world within them. Development must have its 
rude shocks, evolution its transient earthquakes, pro- 
gress its backslidings. Accept the necessity, count the 
cost, make ready to take your part in the things which 
are coming on the earth. Be true to the vast Chris- 
tian principles of the Fatherhood of God and the brother- 
hood of man ; steadily go to war with every opinion 
and system which tends to limit them and to enslave 
men. But in fighting against systems and opinions, 
do not be betrayed yourselves into intolerance of men, 
into inability to see the good in the evil, into any 
statement or action which may practically deny that the 
men whose views you oppose are children of God and 
your brethren in Christ. Constantly keep your temper 
in the battle ; guard jealously your power of looking on 
all sides of questions ; watch over yourself that you may 
be above all things just to men and their opinions. Clear 
your minds from narrowness — the narrowness of reli- 
gion, the narrowness of scepticism, the narrowness of in- 
tellectual vanity ; keep yourself apart from particular 
sets of men and opinion. They tend to fix you down, to 
limit your life, to fetter your thought, to make you wise 
in your own conceits. See that you mix with men 
your brothers, with those who differ from yourselves, who 
oppose and contradict you. Do not ride at anchor in a 



3 1 8 Youths and its Hope of Progress. 
• 

safe and landlocked bay, in cultured comfort of thought, 
having put aside all troublesome questions of the un- 
known. You cannot quench the spirit within you, with- 
out making the intellect one-sided and the conscience 
intolerant or dull. Rather tempt the ocean paths and 
sail on to a boundless horizon, gaining strength from 
trial of your skill, wisdom from the storms of life, ten- 
derness from its sorrows, love from assisting others, and 
faith in the final issue from the clear inward conscious- 
ness that you are growing up into all that is best in 
human nature, into all that is of Christ. Progress is the 
law of the world, it is the law which ought to rule 
our lives. See that you are an active part of the great 
evolution of the race. What matters after all — the 
catastrophes, the convulsions of heart and intellect 
which you must suffer, the shattered sail, the midnight 
watch in the hurricane, the loneliness of the mid- 
ocean ? It is life at least, it is more, it is moving with 
the movement of the world, and the world is moving in 
Christ, 

We look forward, then, with a joy which trembles at 
itself and with a hope which is inexhaustible for man. 
The proper Man is with us ; the ideal Mankind walks 
hand in hand with the imperfect mankind. The spirit 
of universal freedom and truth and justice is moving in 
the ages. He moves the world on slowly — slowly to us ; 
but what are a thousand years to Him ? — and consider, 
He has to save not a sect, or a church, or a few 
favourites, but all mankind. 

The wider your view of Christ's salvation, the more 
reconciled you will be to the slowness of progress ; the 



Youth , and its Hope of tr ogress. 319 

slower you see progress to "be, the more rational becomes 
your hope that all are to be made perfect, eyen as their 
Father. 

Therefore, because the future is — though mysterious — 
full of divine will towards good, go forward with a cheer- 
ful countenance. God keep us faithful to Him, true 
to one another, and universal in spirit, in the time to 
come. 

Take these thoughts with you for the year ; go down 
into the valley with your brothers, and work them out 
in life. We cannot tell our fate, but our fate matters but 
little if Man be going on to good. The mist sleeps over 
the valley beneath, but it is transparent to the eye of 
faith, and through it we see the river of progress 

Roll o'er Elysian fields its amber stream, 

and the notes of a great harmony fall upon our ears, 
sweet and world-compelling as the voice of Christ, when 
He said, 6 Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of 
the world.' 



320 The Presentiments of Youth. 



THE PRESENTIMENTS OF YOUTH. 

*Lo ; I am with, you alway, even unto the end of the world.' 
Matt, xxviii. 20. 

Do any of us remember the hour, when leaving home 
and school and the boy's life behind us, we came to the 
great university with an eager heart ? The first night 
in the antique place, how wonderfully we were stirred 
by it ! As we looked out of our window on the still 
quadrangle, the moonlight poured out like water on the 
grave buildings and the grass, and heard the bells an- 
swering one another in the vocal air, it seemed as if the 
place were alive with all the dead. The thousand forms 1 
of famous men who thither came with unborn thoughts 
within them, which born, should move the world to 
passion and to power, appeared to thrill the air with 
their unseen presence. A strange low crying, as of 
souls who had died here in their enthusiasm and never 
seen their hope, slid by upon the wind. The silence 
was eloquent with those* secrets which are told to hearts 
that listen in the hour of presentiment, secrets which, 
though they seem our own thoughts, are, it may be, 
impressions from that silent world of souls of which our 
intellect knows nothing but our heart so much. As we 
dreamed our dream, hope and fear, enthusiasm and 



The Presentiments of Youth. 321 

depression, interchanged their glow and gloom within 
us. The past life — home and school and childhood — 
vanished for a time ; we seemed to have been asleep 
and only now to have awakened. And with what a 
loosened rein we rode forward into the unknown fields 
of the future ! Should it be failure or success, fame 
or wasted life, enthusiasm deepening into work or 
grown craven in the chill of difficulty ; pleasure decay- 
ing into pain or pain growing into the pleasure of con- 
quest? "What companions, what friendships, what 
changes, what impulses shonld we gain and leave and 
suffer? A few years, and what sentence should we 
pass on the life of youth ? — progress or retrogression ? 

It is gone, that time, but its past passions and pre- 
sentiments come back again and again in life, come, 
most often, men have thought, at the beginning of a 
year. I do not know that one time or another is more 
full of them, for they are of the heart, in whose king- 
dom there is neither time nor space, but it is convenient 
to speak of them now ; to-day, of the look forward over 
our own life, as last Sunday over the world of men. 

Progress is our aim, growth in noble things, develop- 
ment of every human power to perfection. I assume 
that this is your aspiration and your effort. Some 
prefer the base contentment of the Circcean island to 
the uncontented toil of Ulysses on the wandering sea. 
To those I do not speak to-day. The time will come 
when Grod will speak to them in pain and horror of 
themselves, and plague them with sore despair, if not 
here, at least in that undiscovered country where the 
inevitable law of progress will force them' forward till 



322 



The Presentiments of Youth. 



they begin to enjoy the self- development they hated, 
and growth become delight, not pain. But to those 
who still aspire, in whom desire of the better life is still 
alive, who, look forward in hope that some faint grace 
of progress may mark the year, we speak this da}^. 

God will look after our education. We may have to 
suffer from catastrophe, we may be destined to joy ; we 
may undergo the confusion and the pain of an inner 
change in the slow or swift development of a crisis in 
our life. 

These three, catastrophe, joy and change, to either 
or to all of these we look forward in this hour of pre- 
sentiment. 

We take them one by one, we ask if the forecasting 
of them has anything to tell us. And first, the presenti- 
ments of catastrophe, is there any good in them ? Has 
God been unfair to us in leaving them in our nature ? 

I think, when they are presentiments regarding 
others, that they make our life more delicate. They 
give a finer edge to noble passions. Love becomes 
dearer through the dream of loss, the joy of friendship 
more exquisite from our sense of its transiency. There 
are times when the dearest affection and the closest 
friendship weary ; we have exhausted one side of them 
and have not yet found the other. We are tempted 
then to half-rudenesses, small cruelties, want of thought- 
fulness ; but these are softened back into affection when 
we think that we may lose all in a moment, and only the 
memory of the wrong we have done remain. 6 In a year 
all may be over : let me be more gentle, more loving, 
more faithful'; more attentive to the slight courtesies 



The Presentiments of Youth, 323 

and thoughtful cares and pleasant speeches which make 
up the sum of life. While I have time let me give 
all I can. A few more smiles of silent sympathy, a few 
more tender words, a little more restraint on temper 
may make all the difference between happiness and j 
half-happiness to those I live with. 5 And if the pre- 
sentiment of loss do this, it does a gracious work. It 
brings the heart and life into greater harmony with 
Him who loved the little kindnesses, which given, make 
their recollected hours the favourite haunt of memory. 

But if the presentiment of catastrophe be for our- 
selves, it ought to make our inner life more delicate. 
More delicate, inasmuch as there are so many pleasant 
and gracious possibilities in our own nature which we 
neglect to educate. "We might see so much more 
beauty if we willed it. We might cause many unknown 
feelings to flower if we were not in such a hurry to 
feel strong ones. We miss in the swing of excite- 
ment many opportunities of giving sympathy in little 
things to those we love, which if they had been used, 
would have added finer fancies, subtiler and sweeter 
shades to our power of feeling. So many thoughts are 
just touched and laid aside, half thought and then 
forgotten, that it is pitiable how much is wasted in 
ourselves. We go through the meadows of our own 
hearts crushing with a careless step the flowers. 

There is no need to walk so fast. Tread more deli- 
cately, more thoughtfully — lest when the catastrophe 
comes you find too late that you have not got the good 
out of your own nature which you might have done. 

It may be said that this puts a drag upon the duty 



324 The Presentiments of Youth. 

of devoting life with activity to one aim. But I feel 
that there is no fear of this being left unpreached, and 
moreover that it may be preached too much. Activity 
may become feverish; the rush of life may leave no 
( time for the restoring quiet of gentle happiness. We 
save ourselves from weariness and satiety by being 
quieter in the march, more delicate in our appreciation 
of the wayside thoughts and tenderness of life. And 
our activity does not really suffer from this temperance 
in the use of it — from our keeping a Sabbath now and 
then in the inner life. On the contrary, it lasts longer, 
it lives to old age, is healthier in its work, more clear- 
sighted in its aim. 

This is the good of presentiments of catastrophe. 
They minister, if we are wise, to progress, by giving 
a greater finish, a more adorned completeness, to the 
work of life. 

But there is one warning necessary; when we find 
that they refine the feelings and make subtiler the 
thought, we sometimes tend towards indulging in them 
with excess. We do not take them as they come, we 
create them for the delicate pleasure and the refine- 
ment of spirit they afford. They cease then to be 
natural and become aesthetic. 

The punishment of that is swift. Feeling is over- 
refined, and the pleasure is so keen that we do well 
to suspect that it may be the keenness which comes of 
incipient disease. But we have got the habit and go on. 
At last, the pain passes into mortification, and, do what 
we will, we can feel these subtile things no more. Tor 



The Presentiments of Youth. 325 

the more delicate nerves of the heart do not bear much 
playing on. They are killed by over-exercise, and with 
their death all the exqnisiteness of life passes away ; — 
all the good which might come of presentiment of sor- 
row is lost. 

And now, to turn round our thought, if the cata- 
strophe which we imagine should really come in the 
ensuing year, I do not think that the mode of living 
of which I speak is a bad preparation for it. For such 
a way of life brings three things with it : self-sacrifice 
in thoughtfulness for others; temperance in the in- 
dulgence of feeling ; watchfulness for the small bless- 
ings of life. These things are good qualities to have 
when suffering sweeps over the soul. Sorrow is selfish, 
but we have learnt to live in others, and watch for the 
love of others ; sorrow is hardening because it ex- 
hausts feeling, but we have learnt to be temperate in 
the indulgence of feeling ; sorrow makes life a darkness 
which may be felt, but we have learnt to look for God's 
love in little rays of light. We can then meet cata- 
strophe and make progress out of it. And it ought to 
minister to progress. For, as I have said already, it 
upturns the soil of life and brings new elements to 
the surface. We see this even in the outward frame 
of those who have met a great change without being 
crushed or hardened by it. We meet them after the 
wave of pain has passed over them, and there is a new 
expression in their eye, a new movement upon their lip, 
a new distinction on the brow as if the crown of thorns 
had rested there ; the very walk has a new dignity 



326 The Presentiments of Youth. 

and the attitude a new intelligence. They are changed, 
we say. 

So is it with the soul. Subtile changes take place 
within it, changes for good, if we have been true to the 
manhood of Christ, to trust in the Fatherhood of God. 
A new river of tenderness has broken upwards from 
the under-ground of the soul and flows forth to fer- 
tilise the older thoughts and feelings into a richer 
life, with new colours in the flowers they bear. The 
blood-red plant of pain grows among the brighter 
flowers of our happiness ; but its presence makes us 
gentler in life, more dependent upon God and nearer 
to Christ. A strange, new power of inward tears 
softens without weakening all the ruder qualities of 
our nature. Certain sins, certain temptations, cease 
altogether to trouble us. Some way or other they have 
disappeared for ever. "We are less worried by little 
things, less anxious for the morrow, less absorbed in 
the present world. The one great pain has freed us 
from smaller pains ; the one great shadow on this 
world has made us lift our eyes to the eternal shining 
of the other. And strange to say, this carelessness of 
the present life is not less enjoyment, less delicacy of 
happiness, but more; for the carelessness is for the 
ignoble things — for wealth, and the passion of excite- 
ment 5 not for the noble things — for delight in human 
greatness, for the beauty of our Father's world, for the 
blessing of love and friendship. These being seen with 
new feelings are seen with new exquisiteness in them. 

Therefore, if you be destined to catastrophe, let it 
work in you new development. Remember we are not 



The Presentiments of Yotc/k. 327 

left alone to meet our sorrow. One is with us who 
works with us. Our presentiment may be His note 
of warning to His child, and with the dark prophecy 
is linked the promise, ' Lo, I am with you always.' 

Secondly, are we ready for the progress which ought 
to grow out of joy ? We look forward to joy this year, 
but there can be no progress got out of it if we seek to 
drain it dry in a moment. We need temperance in our 
delight. Some plunge their whole face into the rose 
of joy, and become drunk with the scent, but in doing 
so they crush their rose and break it from its stem. 
The leaves wither, the colour dies, the freshness of the 
perfume fades, their pleasure is gone. 

The wiser man prefers to keep his rose of joy upon 
its stem ; to visit its beauty not all at once but day by 
day, that he may have it cool and in the dew. He 
likes to go from leaf to leaf, understanding the indi- 
viduality of every petal, slowly increasing pleasure, till 
at last he gets to the heart of the flower and possesses 
its last and sweetest odour. In this way all the past 
delights which he has had from leaf to leaf are kept, and 
go to swell the perfect enjoyment. And this pleasure 
is greater than his who has crushed his pleasure into a 
moment, for it is more experienced, more complex, and 
more delicate. And being so, it also possesses per- 
manence. It has not been destroyed by intemperate 
handling. It is, after many days, as fresh as when its 
happy finder first discovered it. And if, residing at its 
heart, its whole influence of odour and colour should 
threaten to grow so overpowering as to make satiety 
thereof a danger, he leaves the central cup and goes 



328 The Presentiments of Youth. 



back to wander among the leaves again, till re-enjoying 
the lesser delights, he can take back a quiet heart to 
re-enjoy the greatest. 

Suppose a new friendship enters into your life. If 
the man or woman is worth anything to you, they 
ought to be worth a great deal. They ought to ad- 
vance and quicken your development as you theirs. 
They ought to make you more complex, more sympa- 
thetic with the great Mankind. One knows — he is a 
poor person who does not — how delightful the first 
rush of feeling is, when as yet we only hope we have 
found another friend, another soul which can touch*ours. 
Old things become new ; it is like dew upon a thirsty 
meadow. Fresh faculties are developed, a fresh eagerness 
seizes on the old. The dull places of the spirit suffer 
an enchantment. Music — c sounds which give delight 
and hurt not ' — play about the path of life. We look 
forward to exploring a new soul, as men who have found 
a new continent. But, if led by this ear]y impetuosity, 
we rush, without any waiting thought, into the world on 
whose verge we stand, we miss all the good of it. We 
neglect the delicate shades of feeling and thought 
which give permanent interest to a character. Our 
rush is wanting in reverence, and the soul we attempt 
to know recoils and hides itself. We seek only the one 
great point of character which attracts us ; we attain it 
and it is all over . It is like men who, inspired by the 
mountain passion, hurry to the top and never pause by 
the wayside beauty of the path. They come down 
tired out ; they have learnt nothing ; they go away 
next day. 



The Presentiments of Youth. 329 

I think this is unbearable intemperance of character ; 
it is worse ; it is an insolence done to the natural 
privacy of the soul ; it is a waste of the blessing and 
pleasure which God wished to give us .in friendship. 
There is no progress to be gained from it ; no lessons 
to be learnt, no new elements to be developed in us. 
We lose everything by hurry. Above all, we lose our 
friends, supposing we have won them for a time. They 
feel that there has been no real comprehension of their 
character, only knowledge of one or two things in 
them. They will slowly fall away from us, they cannot 
help ifc. And then, when all has been lost, the punishment 
is sharp. We feel that we have not been strong enough 
to win or keep the good God gave us : nor can we 
enjoy the memory even of the pleasure we have had, for 
unproductive pleasure leaves pain behind it. 

It is the wisdom of life, on the contrary, to receive 
our friends as from the hand of God, and to give to the 
task of understanding them the same trouble as we give 
to the comprehension of the thoughts of God in nature ; 
to work out the drama of our love and friendship subject 
to the primary feeling in the mind of Christ, reverence 
for the human soul. Then, in the midst of the new 
enjoyment which they bring us, we shall find additional 
power of progress, and the delights of life will be as much 
an element of our evolution towards good as its sorrows. 

Lastly, we look forward to change, sometimes with 
exultation, sometimes with dread ; with the former in 
youth, with the latter in manhood. 

That prophetic joy with which youth foresees and 
welcomes change of light and shade in life, and happi-* 
15 



330 The Presentiments of Youth. 

ness in every change — what man among us, who knows 
what after-life becomes, would rudely dash its exultation P 
It is the spring vitality which sends the sap streaming 
upwards to fill to overflowing every channel, to nourish 
the remotest fibre, of the tree of life. Make the most of 
it, lay up your store of joy, prophesy a famous future 
in a golden dream of hope, for the power does not come 
twice. But oh ! keep it pure. Let thought and feeling, 
as they range forward in triumph, be hallowed by the 
knowledge that you are the child of God, and called to 
be His servant from change to change. Live from one 
varied scene to another as if you felt the presence of 
Him who is with you always, even to the end of the 
world. For there is no sadness so unutterable as that 
which comes of the self-destruction of our youthful 
prophecies ; of the change of exultation, as years go on, 
into slothfulness and depression. It is a terrible thing 
to look back, an outworn man, upon the past and be 
ashamed of our early inspiration, to see our bright- 
haired youth go by us like a phantom, and to hide our 
face and cry : That is what I was, what might I not 
have been ! Once, c bounded in a nutshell, I could 
count myself a king of infinite space, but now I have 
bad dreams.' 

There are some who fall so hopelessly from this ideal 
that there is nothing more for them in this life. They 
must wait till, transferred to a fairer clime, they have, so 
to speak, another chance. But for others who still retain 
enough of purity, enough of vitality to begin afresh, 
there is forgiveness to be won ; they look forward unto 
change again. But they have received a rude shock, 



The Presentiments of Youth. 331 

and, though they kuow change must come, so much 
has gone from them, that it is no longer with exulta- 
tion, but with a kind of dread, that manhood prefi- 
gures any change of life. We fear the loss of interest 
in existence, the decay of intellect, the coming of 
satiety, the long disease of age. We fear still more 
the possible approach of uniformity, of day after day 
the same, of the burden and apathy of decay. We 
fear change for the losses it may bring if it shatter us 
too much, yet we fear the absence of change still more. 

But why should we fear when He is with us always, 
even to the end ? We nourish no longer, as in youth, a 
proud self-dependence. We have a spiritual Presence 
within us whom we have made our own, and whose 
dearest work is our development. We know Him who 
went from change to change and in whom the ideal life 
grew ever brighter to the close. All change when He is 
present is advance. One after one we lose the mortal and 
the visible, but we gain the immortal and the invisible. 
The mountain-side we climb grows ever more and more 
alone — still more desolate of the things we once loved 
so dearly — but we are nearer at every step to heaven, 
and One waits us on the highest peak who will renew our 
strength. The landscape of our youth lies far below, 
and the shadows fall around it. We see but faintly 
now our childhood's home, the meadows where we 
played, the river we passed in boyhood, the path 
through the trees where we began to climb the moun- 
tain. These things seem centuries ago, dead in the 
dead past. It is a feeling not without its touch of 
bitterness ; but let us but have heroism of heart to go 



332 



The Presentiments of Youth. 



on alone, and trust in our brother Christ enough to 
lean upon his secret sympathy, and we shall hear his 
voice give answer to our heart : s Be not afraid, it is I. 
Lo ! I am with you always, even to the end of the world.' 

Yes, middle age has come upon us, and we need a 
higher help than our own will to meet the change and 
chance of mortal life. They must come, and the solemn 
question is, shall we be able to conquer their evil, have 
we divine life enough in the spirit to make them into 
means of advance ? For it is wise to remember that any 
change may be our overthrow. 

It is time, then, to examine into our readiness for 
temptation. Our passions — are they under our com- 
mand ? There is in many persons a curious sense of un- 
awakened capability of passion — and a fear of its being 
awakened in a wrong direction. They have lived a 
peaceful, self -restrained life for years, but sometimes — 
in a moment — what has been felt as a dim possibility 
becomes a reality. A torrent force of passion, in some 
hour of change, sweeps over life and for a time masters 
and enslaves the will. 

Is our will in order? — have we habituated it in 
the power of Christ, and by a great love to liis holi- 
ness, to conquer daily the motions of sin, the minor 
impulses of a passionate nature, the common tempta- 
tions of a nature apparently cold? It is this habi- 
tual and prayerful preparation which is the only sure 
one, for we know not what one day of change may 
bring forth. We may lose in a week the fruit of the 
efforts of years. And it is terribly hard in middle life to 
get right again ; it is a weary struggle then to redeem 



The Presentiments of Youth. 333 

the devastation of passion. For many years progress 
is at an end. 

It is the same with other things. Our love of 
honesty of soul, of truth to our own convictions — we 
are ready enough to make our boast that the spirit of 
the world cannot touch these things. Possibly it cannot, 
as we are now. But if a sudden change take place — if 
fortune should smile in a moment upon us, or reputa- 
tion come in an instant — our self-confidence is but poor 
protection. Suppose all we want in life, our highest 
aim, that position in which we think we can do most 
good and carry out the ideas of a lifetime, were offered 
us to-morrow, if we would but modify a few prin- 
ciples and forfeit a few convictions — are we prepared 
for that? Not so, unless we have realised and loved 
day by day, with prayer and humility, the truth above 
all things : and I know that the love we bear to truth is 
firmest when it is borne to One who died as its witness 
— to One who is the truth, and therefore can give the 
truth to men ; to One who has promised as the Truth 
to be with us always, even to the end of the world. 

It is not too much to say that in middle age, if 
the spirit of the world gets hold of a man and he 
is false to God and his own soul, he is fixed in degra- 
dation for many years ; or the agony with which he is 
redeemed exhausts life, and he is to the end a broken 
man. 

It is a wonderful drama this life of ours, and it 
is infinitely strange to separate ourselves at times from 
ourselves and look on as a spectator only at our own 
little kingdom. It has its beginnings, its rightful 



334 The Presentiments of Youth. 

kings, its hours of inob-rule, its battles for existence, 
its revolutions, its reorganisations, its usurpers, its 
triumphs, and we tremble for its safety as we gaze. 
Will it get out of all its trouble and change, into order 
and peace at last ? At first we cannot tell. We rush 
back and unite our thought to ourselves again, and it 
seems that nothing can be done in the darkness and the 
anarchy of life. It is our hour of depression. The 
chamber of the soul is 6 hung with pain and dreams,' 
and we ourselves feel like wafts of seaweed swept out 
to sea on the strong tide of fate into the midnight. 

But stay; — are we so alone, so unhelped, so for- 
gotten, so feeble, such victims of blind fate ? Not so, 
if a triumphant humanity has lived for us — not so, if 
Christ has been in our nature bringing into it the 
order and perfection of Divinity, not so if these words 
have any value : c Lo ! I am with you always for then, 
we are in Him, and to be in Him is to be fated to 
progress passing into perfection, for we are Christ's, 
and Christ is God's. 

Take up then your life this year, through catastrophe, 
through joy, through change, with the courage of 
children of God ; with the resolution of kings who wear 
the crown, and assume the responsibilities of 'self- 
conquest ; with faith in that immortality of ours in 
Christ, the awful inspiration of which dignifies, impels, 
and chastens life ; with the ineffable comfort of the 
sympathy and strength of Him whose divine Manhood 
is with us and all our brothers always, even to the 
end of the world. 



The Mid-day of Life. 335 



THE MID- DAY OF LIFE. 

THE TRANSITION PROM YOUTH TO MANHOOD. 

( Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil 
days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have 
no pleasure in them.' — Eccles. xii. 1. 

There are some summer days which after a clear 
morning pass through a season of gloom. The sun 
hides itself behind a veil of cloud ; depression falls on 
animals and plants. All things retire into themselves, 
as if defrauded by the morning brightness. The day 
itself seems to feel that it has not fulfilled the prophecy 
of its dawning, and lies heavily upon the earth. But 
it is only for a time. Just as the manhood of the 
day has come, it conquers its early sullenness — the 
clouds disperse, the sun breaks out, the birds resume 
their song, a new youthfulness runs through the trees. 

It is the image of one who, having in later youth 
passed through much trouble, and lost during it the 
use, and joy, and naturalness of youth, recovers these 
in the midst of manhood. 

There are other summer days when the freshness 
has been more or less constant, when the sun has 
never altogether hidden its light, when the morning 
breeze has gone on blowing even during the heat of 



336 The Mid-day of Life. 

noon, wlien noon retains so much of moisture that the 
trees do not droop in the heat, nor the animals take to 
shelter. Afternoon and evening come, and this short 
stage of freshness passes away, but it has been there. 

It is the image of one who has entered on manhood 
or womanhood, and yet has retained much of the 
fervour, restlessness, and breezy life of youth. 

There are other summer days in which the progress 
is neither broken by any cloud, nor yet delighted by any 
continuance of freshness. When mid-day comes, it 
absorbs the morning and all its elements. It is dusty 
noontide, warm, full of work, making all things drink 
its good, passing naturally and steadily on to the after- 
noon and evening. 

It is the image of those who have absorbed all the 
elements of their youth when they enter upon manhood 
or womanhood, and who settle down steadily to the 
work of life. 

These, then, are three examples out of many of the 
way in which we pass from youth into the first half of 
middle age, and through the porch of the temple of 
manhood and womanhood, enter into the nave. It will 
be our work to-day to consider them, their temptations, 
and the lessons which belong to them. 

1. There are certain characters which in youth lose 
part of their youth. Something has stepped in which 
has spoilt life. Sorrow or overwork has taken the 
edge from enjoyment by taking away physical health ; 
a gloomy horn® has repressed enthusiasm; a wilful 
self-repression, born of religious asceticism, or of the 
demands of exacting friendship, has driven so deep the 



j 



The Transition from Youth to Manhood, 337 



springs of natural feeling that with all their innate 
force they cannot rise to refresh the surface of the heart. 
Sometimes these characters never recover : the process 
has gone too far, and they will never taste of youth 
again till they go home to God. Sometimes they turn 
!o fanaticism and become the curse of the earth ; but 
God, who knows the weakness of men, will be just to 
them — victims of fate — and remember that they are 
but dust. Sometimes this repression, especially when 
inflicted by religious parents, has its result in a reaction 
against the tyranny done, in the name of God, and 
nature crushed in its natural, breaks out in unnatural 
channels. The man becomes a blasphemer and a pro- 
fligate. The woman flies into the dissipation of the 
world, or meets a sadder though often a less sinful fate 
— the easy victim of one of those men who make the 
murder of womanhood their vile trade and viler pleasure. 

But the case we speak of first is a happier one than 
these. It is of those characters who after repression, 
and when the time of youth is past, grow young again. 
Some blessed circumstance, some new affection, some 
happier climate of life pierces through the crust to the 
spring of youth beneath, and, like the waters of that 
artesian well which, coming from their snowy home 
among the mountains, were at last struck in the midst 
of the American desert and surging upwards turned the 
wilderness to a fruitful field, so now, in such characters, 
the waters of a hidden life of youth rush upwards, the 
more abundant from their long suppression. 

It comes on man or woman with a shock of exquisite 
surprise. They feel as a plant might feel, which, never 



33» 



The Mid- day of Life. 



expecting to bloom, opens suddenly in the midst of June 
its flower-cups to the soft wind, and the blue sky, and 
the visits of the birds and bees. Existence is transfigured. 
The soul is gifted with new powers, and the heart with 
a wealth of new feelings. They cannot help making 
experiments with all these new instruments. Every 
day is delightful, for every day there is something fresh 
to be tried, and the life of living seems inexhaustible. 
Naturally, there is a dissipation of powers, a want of 
concentration, a want of foresight, and these things 
coming in the midst of manhood or womanhood are 
dangerous to progress. 

Again, in these cases, the curious, thing is this — a 
thing which entangles the threads of life — that the rush 
of youth extinguishes the graver and sterner qualities 
which naturally belong to manhood and womanhood, 
and the man lives with the qualities of the youth, and by 
them, and the woman also. They grow older in years, 
but younger in nature, and the man does man's work 
with a boy's heart, and the woman, woman's work with 
a girl's feelings. A few quaint temptations beset such 
persons. They are sometimes seized with a sudden 
passion to throw by work altogether, like a schoolboy, 
and to run away, and it is almost a physical pain to 
resist this temptation. Very often all the work of the 
world seems as ridiculous to them as it does to a child, 
and to enjoy the only really right thing in life. They 
suffer, and not a little, from the want of fitness between 
their inner life and their outer work, and the suffering 
makes them impatient, and impatience spoils their work. 
Their heart is so open to new impressions that, almost 



The Transition from Youth to Manhood. 339 

like a child, they take up one pursuit after another and 
finish none, the impression of the present being so 
strong that they cannot resist it. Of course all this 
produces a certain amount of unfitness for the world 
and for their daily labour, so that their fellow-workers 
think them unsafe, imprudent, and their leaders, if they 
belong to a party, set them aside as incapable of 
discipline. The best thing about them is not only 
their freshness — so that meeting them is like meeting 
a sparkling stream on a thirsty day — but also their 
natural individuality. They cannot get into the groove 
of things. 

Now, what is it that they want ? — for it is plain that 
the inevitable fault of such characters is the dissipa- 
tion of thought, energy, and life. They want concentra- 
tion of will towards a single and a noble aim ; not such 
a concentration as will destroy their youthful feeling* 
or injure their originality — for the very fact of that 
originality in the midst of a world enslaved to customs 
is more than other men's work — but a concentration 
which will leave their nature free, and yet make its 
freedom strong through the rule of law. 

We seek this concentration in one aim after another. 
But there is always the chance of failure, and failure 
is followed by despondency, and despondency imprisons 
energy, . and life is spoilt. Or the aim becomes stained 
with a mean or selfish motive, and we are then haunted 
with the sense of something radically wrong in us which 
strangles all endeavour, and so drift back into our 
aimless roving life again. 

We want an aim which never can grow vile, an aim 



340 



The Mid-day of Life. 



wtricli cannot disappoint our hope. There is but one 
on earth, and it is that of being like God. He who 
strives after union with the perfect Love must grow 
out of selfishness, and the nobility of the strife makes 
meanness impossible. And as to failure, failure is out 
of the question ; our success is secured in the omnipo- 
tent Holiness of God. 

Concentrate, then, your will on this. Do not wish, 
but will to be at one with God. ' Ask, and ye shall 
receive ; seek, paid ye shall find.' 

The habit of concentration won in this spiritual 
realm, where prayer brings success, soon extends itself 
to the realm of intellectual and practical life. Your 
youthfulness of spirit is not destroyed, but a centre of 
strength is given to its feelings and its acts. Nor is 
the number of objects and of interests which you have, 
and which give charm and variety to life, limited by 
this spiritual concentration of the being towards God ; 
on the contrary, you gain a power of harmonising them 
into order under the rule of a leading and noble idea. 
Your originality is not lessened, but increased, for it 
is revealed to us that a special work of God's Spirit is 
the development of the peculiar gifts of each man. 

The second case I speak of is of characters which, 
passing into manhood and womanhood, retain for many 
years the elements of youth. This differs from the 
first, inasmuch as youth has not been repressed, but 
previously enjoyed. Hence the youthfulness of these 
persons is not so young as that of which we have 
been speaking, and it is mingled naturally with the 
graver and steadier thoughts of advancing years. As 



The Transition from Youth to Manhood. 341 

the chief danger of the former is dissipation of character, 
the chief danger of the latter lies in over-fervency of 
character. One knows them by their sudden eagerness 
when interested, and by the ease with which they are 
interested ; by the way in which their nature breaks into 
flower at the touch of sympathy ; by the rapid intensify- 
ing of all their powers and feelings when they feel them- 
selves liked and comprehended, so that they are much 
greater and better at one hour than at another ; by the 
passion which they put into common things, and the 
way in which they exhaust on small work far more 
force than is needed. One knows them by their quick- 
ness, and by the half-shame which touches them when 
they have been over-quick in thought ; by their delight- 
ful unconsciousness, and by their quick repression of 
feeling when they become suddenly self-conscious, their 
whole expanded leaves closing in a moment ; by the 
intensity also of their self-consciousness when they 
have fallen into it. One knows them by their exagge- 
rated contempt for form and their exaggerated love for 
the informal ; by their love of theories, and their im- 
patience and distress when either their theories are 
opposed by others, or they themselves are prevented by 
circumstances from realising them ; by their harshness 
in speaking of those who are commonplace; by their 
impetuosity in reply, and the way in which contradic- 
tion astonishes them ; by their frequent one-sidedness, 
for their convictions are so strong that they can sel- 
dom see the force of opposite convictions ; by the want 
of form in what they do and say ; by a certain 
inarticulateness ; by a certain want of finish. One 



342 



The Mid- day of Life, 



knows them by sudden fits of weariness of existence 
and of sadness, during which life is seen as preterna- 
turally dark, so that older persons smile ; by the way 
in which sorrow when it comes surprises them, and joy 
when it comes gives no surprise ; by the way in which 
they trade upon their health as if it were inexhausti- 
ble, and on feeling as if its enthusiasm could have no 
reaction. 

All this is complicated by the graver thoughts and 
feelings of manhood and womanhood, which in this 
case we have conceived as existing side by side with 
youth and its fervour. 

For the very presence of this young enthusiasm 
makes depression darker when it comes spiritually with 
doubt, or physically with exhaustion. As the brightest 
flowers look the dismallest upon dark days, so the 
brightest natures are the gloomiest when things go 
very wrong. In the hour of their depression the re- 
covery of belief in God seems impossible, the toil of life 
unbearable. The awful shadow of the unknown lies 
heaviest on these ; they feel -the darkness more, and 
question it more bitterly. When they sin against 
their Father, their remorse is so keen that sin seems 
unforgivable. As kind as God seems when they are 
happy and excited, so severe doe£ He seem when they 
are unhappy. Excessively in enthusiasm for work when 
all goes well, they are beyond just measure chilled when 
all goes ill. Necessarily they are victimised by fluctua- 
tions of feeling, and in these fluctuations the force of 
will is in abeyance. They become at last, if they 
do not take care, like seaweed tossed on the ocean, the 



The Transition from Youth to Manhood. 343 

mere sport of circumstances, * weak as is a breaking 
wave.' 

Now what we want in this case is not the rooting out 
of youthful enthusiasm, but its direction. 

Endeavour to make your enthusiasm self-restrained. 
The reason of all these depressions, and the weakness 
which follows on a succession of excitements and reac- 
tions, is, that we allow our fervour to run wild without 
a curb. It exhausts itself, and when trial comes or 
doubts attack us we have no force left to meet them. 
At once we drop into feebleness and melancholy. 

Begin to win the power of will over enthusiasm in 
the sphere of your spiritual life. Power of will comes 
to man when he claims and makes by faith the Will 
of God as his own. Power of self-restraint is gained 
when a man so loves the perfection of Christ that he 
cannot allow himself to run into every excitement. 
He stops and asks himself, 'Would my Master have 
done this ? — would He have smiled upon it ? ' 

A few years of this reference of life to Him, and 
life is no longer a mere field of unrestrained abandon- 
ment to feeling ; we begin to realise our difficulties, and 
what those words mean, > c Can ye drink of the cup which 
I drink of ? ' We feel that we shall want all the ardour 
we possess for the long contest against evil, for the 
j race home to God. We learn to economise our force of 
enthusiasm, to keep it stored up against the day of the 
cross. We solemnly dedicate our life in prayer to our 
Divine Father, and ask of Him not to take away our 
fervour, but to double it, by giving us the righteous 
will which rules it nobly. 



344 



The Mid- day of Life. 



The result will be, not the loss of youthful ardour, 
but the addition to it, by the will, of strength and calm. 
Difficulty will not depress it, but heat it to a white 
heat ; doubt will only stir it into regulated action ; for 
its source no longer is in ourselves alone, but in the 
uncreated fire of the love of God. 

Then, having ennobled and disciplined spiritual fer- 
vour, all other sources of enthusiasm will be ennobled with 
it. It will never permit them to be exhausted. Always 
directing them to perfect aims, they will, in pursuit 
of these, absorb instead of losing new force; for en- 
thusiasm which feeds on noble objects redoubles its 
force as much as enthusiasm which feeds on ignoble 
objects exhausts its force. 

Have, therefore, true and sublime ideals for your 
youthful fervour. These will preserve it to old age. 
Aspire ardently after truth, purity, many-sided charity, 
holiness of life ; let everything else be put under these 
things. Be convinced of great truths, feel in the 
depths of your heart their beauty and their force. Be 
able to say, c I know that God is my Father, and the 
Father of mankind ; I know that the world and I have 
a Eedeemer from evil; I know that mankind has 
been made Divine in Christ; I know that there is a 
Divine Spirit in me and in Mankind, who is educating 
us towards the perfect life. I know One who is the 
Resurrection and the Life to all mankind.' You can- 
not be convinced of mighty truths like these without 
being set on fire by them, and the fire will kindle every 
intellectual and imaginative enthusiasm which you 
possess into an abiding ardour of action so instinct 



The Transition from Youth to Manhood. 345 

with that from which it flowed that it will propagate 
the sacred energy and set others on fire with the same. 
In this manner seek to correct and develope your youth- 
fulness of nature in the midst of advancing years. By 
and by calm will come — not the calm of stagnation, but 
the calm which sits in the midst of intensity of feeling. 
That which disturbs and tosses our unregulated enthu- 
siasm is vanity — desire of fame — the intruding element 
of personal interests. Our fervour of spirit becomes 
quiet, yet strong, when its highest impulse is beyond 
ourselves, when we can fix our most ardent wishes 
upon Christ, and find in Him the source of a sus- 
tained aspiration. For it is not only truths which 
inspire us, but truths embodied in One whom we" can 
love. Pride, selfishness, want of charity, may creep in 
when we devote ourselves to noble ideas alone. But 
when we love them in a perfect Person who loves us, self 
and conceit are wholly lost, and in their loss calm is 
made co-ordinate with ardent feeling. 

The third and last case we mentioned was that of 
characters who pass steadily from youth to manhood, 
leaving their youth behind them. 

These settle down quietly to work. They have but 
little ardour of nature; they are not led astray by the 
vagaries of reappearing youth. They enter on their 
chosen business, and do it steadily from day to day — the 
man his work, the woman hers. 

Their tendency, since they have no youthfulness to 
complicate their nature, is to become men and women 
of one dominant idea — to let their particular business or 
profession absorb all the energies of their nature into 



346 



The Mid-day of Life. 



itself, so that one portion of their character is especially 
developed and the other portions left untrained. Like- 
Aaron's serpent, it swallows all the rest. They become, 
in this way, incomplete men. It is said, and with 
general truth, that for a great success in life this absorp- 
tion is necessary. But it may be questioned whether 
a great success is not dearly purchased at the price of 
an imperfect manhood — whether success is the chief 
thing in life. Very successful persons are for the most 
part not men one would choose for companions in a 
voyage, or for friends in the greater voyage of life. 
They want variety, they want animation, they are too 
often the sated worshippers of their own success. And 
what they often are to us they are in reality in relation to 
themselves — not men, but the tenth or twentieth part of 
a man. But this is not only true of men who succeed, 
but also of those who are not successful, yet plod on — 
men and women only of one aspiration, of one business, 
like those who spend all their life in making the heads 
of pins. 

It is wise to let something of success go, not to be 
anxious even about becoming either the first merchant 
or the first pointer of pins, in order that you may be 
able to train yourself into a more perfect man. Do not 
leave your imagination without its food, or starve your 
heart. He is but a poor creature, however famous in 
his own peculiar walk, who is the slave of figures, or 
of science, or of politics — machines for turning out 
machine work. Men ought not to be steam-engines, 
nor to work like them, though that seems to be a 



The Transition from Youth to Manhood. 347 

prevalent notion. They are "born to love and feel, to 
imagine and aspire. 

Nor, above all, should we let the world and its work 
quench the demands of the spirit within us which desires 
union with the living God. If you allow the noise of 
your enthralling business to drown those inward cries, 
they grow fainter then and fainter, and the spirit falls 
into lethargy. The noblest portion of your being is left 
ignorant as an infant. Is that to be a complete man ? 

Feed that immortal thing with its true food, love to 
God, which is love to God's character in Christ ; open its 
doors to the education of the Spirit of God, and be not 
troubled but rather nobly proud, if your spirit, trained 
by His power, prevent some of those many transac- 
tions in public life which make a fortune by running 
to the very edge of dishonesty, or hinder you from 
taking a place the comfort of which would have to be 
bought by the sacrifice of convictions. A fortune — a 
position — these are not the first things, in spite of the 
lying world which says they are. The spirit which can 
hold fast to truth, though it means the acceptance of 
ruin — the spirit which can refuse to be enriched at the 
expense of honour: — the spirit which can do nothing 
which sins against its neighbour, is better than the life 
of Dives or the leadership of the fashionable world. 

Educate all your being, for being devoid of the ardour 
of youth, and believing in steady work, you are in danger 
of becoming a one-sided man. Let your effort be to be 
manifold and many-sided, while you cling fast to your 
particular work. This is our Christian duty. Tor Christ 



348 



The Mid-day of Life. 



came to save the whole of our nature, to present us, at 
the end, body, soul, and spirit, perfect to his Father. 

Lastly, our religious life settles down into* a matter 
of habit as we pass into manhood and womanhood, and 
this, though coming first to those who have not re- 
tained youth, becomes at last the case of the others 
also. I speak, then, to all: 

Our morality becomes fixed. Truth, purity, and the 
rest become habits, like the habit of walking. Beware 
lest they become Pharisaic, and pass from habits into 
mere forms. There is but one way of avoiding this, 
and that is by cherishing a great ideal which will not 
let us be satisfied. Christ gives us that ideal : 6 Be ye 
therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is per- 
fect.' And He Himself supplies the motive, for the 
great love which we nourish to Him will sweep us con- 
tinually out of the region of formal morality into that 
realm where the life of self-sacrifice produces natural 
and noble action. 

Our views of truth become fixed. Only beware of hold- 
ing them as if they were the real essences of which they 
are only the forms. Be ready to change them if you 
find it necessary for the progress of your spiritual life 
that the essential truths you hold should wear new 
garments. 

Our inner religious life becomes necessarily more fixed, 
more a matter of continuous and quiet exercise, and 
less a matter of sudden and enthusiastic feeling. We 
cannot help sometimes regretting this and fancying 
that because we do not feel so keenly, we are less near 
God, more near the world. We shall never feel so 



The Transition from Youth to Manhood. 349 

deeply again, we think — never recall those hours when 
life seemed for a time to breathe the air of heaven itself. 
But in no case are we right to waste time on such re- 
grets. Our business now is to go forward and to redeem 
the past. We may not get back the freshness of early 
inspiration; but we may attain something better — the 
resolute heart of noble faith, which, trusting in a 
Saviour of men, has the confidence to take up duty for 
his sake and for the sake of men his brothers, and, 
though failure and failure come, to win at last, through 
the doing of duty, those profounder, calmer, and more 
enduring feelings of nearness to God, which will bear 
the test of time and overcome at the end the shame 
and fear of death. 

But, after all, were our religious feelings in youth 
deeper than those which we possess now ? Unless we 
have been altogether going back, I cannot think so. 
They seem to us now, as we look back, to have been 
deeper ; but they only seem so. In reality, it is because 
we feel more keenly and more strongly now, that we 
so canonise our youthful feelings. We impute to 
them, unconsciously, our present depth and strength of 
passion. We retain in memory the religious impres- 
sions of our early life, and we colour them with our own 
deeper hues, till they seem much more earnest and 
divine than they really were. 

The fact is, youth cannot feel so deeply as man- 
hood and womanhood, unless manhood and womanhood 
have been debased and hardened. Is not doubt of 
G-od's love a worse thing to us now than it was when 
we were young ? Ts not the cry of our hearts for 



35o 



The Mid-day of Life. 



light more "unutterable now than in the days when it 
came and went so quickly? Is not our hatred of 
sin, and our desire to escape from the dreadful circle 
of self into life with God and love of all in Christ, 
more intense, though far more silent, than it was of 
old ? Is not our longing for certainty, for the assurance 
of the eternal life in union with our Father, more pro- 
found as we advance in years ? Have not this world and 
its worldliness, though perhaps we live more in them, 
less power over us ? It is not that we feel less, but 
that the movement of our feelings is larger, and their 
waters so deep that they are less easily disturbed. 

But, after all, whether we feel much or little is not 
so much matter. The one thing needful for those who 
have passed into the stage of life which follows upon 
youth is to do the will of God, to consecrate their 
manhood and womanhood to the welfare of Man, to 
look forward to finishing the work given them to do, 
and at last, to the rest which remaineth for the people 
of God. 



The A ft er noon of Life. 351 



THE AFTERNOON OF LIFE. 

THE RESTORATION OE THE INTERESTS AND POETRY OF YOUTH, 

' Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things ; so that thy youth is 
renewed like the eagle's.' — Psalm ciii. 5. 

The afternoon of life is marked by the concentration 
of our powers round one centre of work and thought. 
In youth, at our first entrance into manhood, we take up 
many interests, we make experiments upon our faculties 
and on many subjects, and so vivid is our force, and 
so large our heart, that we seem to have room for all. 

One by one, most of these interests die away. We 
discover our inability to carry them further than a short 
way, or we cease to care to do so. As our character 
developes, many are seen to be out of harmony with it, 
or even to check its natural movement onwards ; but 
they are useful in telling us what we cannot do and 
what we can. At last one or two take special power 
over us, and absorb the rest. If they grow naturally 
out of our character, if they are fitted to our powers 
as the sword is to the hand, our life flows smoothly 
to its end. If they are imposed on us by coercion 
of others, or of circumstances — and in such a light we 
are forced to regard the life of some in this crooked 
world — our life is injured and our course rugged and 



352 



The Afternoon of Life, 



painful to the close. But, whether our fate be one or 
the other, few of us have reached the later manhood 
without finding ourselves fixed in one pursuit. The 
traveller in the Alps walking in the early morning and 
seeing the white clouds change around a mountain-peak, 
cannot distinguish at a distance which is the summit 
and which the cloud. Now one form and now another 
attracts his eager gaze. But as the sun climbs the 
heaven, it lifts the wreathing vapour, and, drawing 
nearer, he sees at last, sharply defined against the pure 
sky, the one clear cone. So the voyager of life delights 
himself in cloud after cloud in the morning of his years ; 
but when the afternoon has come, the one thing he has 
to do distinctly opens forth, and challenges his effort. 

He finds the work of his life. At once all his powers 
concentrate themselves on this, and force, once scattered 
over a hundred interests, intensifies itself on one. It 
is then that life becomes strong, for life is at unity with 
itself. 

And now, having found our work and settled down to 
climb the mountain steadily, there is a further question. 
What spirit is at the centre of our life ? Whence do 
we draw the inspiration of effort? What is the mo- 
tive power which influences and colours all our work? 
Does it depend on self or on Christ ? It is a solemn 
question, for the answer defines whether the real labour 
of life will be eternal or not, useful to man or not, a 
source of growth or not to our own being. 

And when I ask this question in this relation, I really 
mean whether a man's life has beyond its special aim 
a further aim of devotion to the cause of Man. I 



Restoration of Interests and Poetry of Youth. 353 

mean here by the spirit of Christ the spirit which sub- 
ordinates life to the cause of man, for that was the 
central spirit of Christ's existence. And something more 
I mean. I mean that he who sees the Eace in Christ 
sees it at one with God in idea though not as yet in 
fact, and beholds himself as one of a great and united 
body who are here on earth to slowly grow up into 
union with God by faithful work — by long effort at 
last to realise that idea which God had of the full- 
grown Man, and which Christ now represents in God. 

The man, then, who has Christ at the centre of his life 
— that is, the great ideas of which Christ is the personal 
realisation — cannot settle down into the dulness of man- 
hood, content to lose altogether the things which made 
his youth so bright and happy. He desires to grow, and 
to grow by regaining these in a truer and more lasting 
form. He cannot abide in that spirit of selfishness 
which, by fixing our thoughts on personal success alone, 
forbids us to turn aside to seek in work for man higher 
thoughts to transfigure our life, or to refresh ourselves 
with the poetical aspects of man or nature. /These 
things are unpractical,' says self; 6 these things are 
necessary for your true manhood,' replies the spirit of 
Christ. 

How may we recover in manhood, but in a wiser 
way, what was noble in our youth — recover our mani- 
fold interests, our poetic feeling towards the history of 
man and nature — our ideal of the goodness, truth, and 
love of man ? 

The first two will form the subject of this morning's 
sermon; the last the subject for next Sunday. 
16 



354 



The Afternoon of Life. 



1. The restoration of manifold interests, 
I have said that in settling into* the groove of life 
we lose variety of interests. And the danger is lest, in 
clinging close to one alone, we develope only one part 
of onr being. The student who pulls his philosophic 
"bonnet over his ears that he may hear nothing but the 
whispers of the Ego ; the scientific man to whom there 
is nothing in the world but his flint flakes or his gases ; 
the theologian who buries himself in his speculations, 
forget that they themselves are greater than these 
things, and that man is infinitely greater. They hoard 
up a little knowledge, but they die with only one mem- 
ber of their nature developed, and that abnormally, 
and their usefulness to others has been almost a cipher. 
It is far worse when the object pursued is something 
which, pursued for itself alone, is base — money, rank, 
position in society, fame, things which have no worth 
unless they are used for men. 

If the spirit of self is at the centre of your life, 
there is no doubt of your success in attaining these 
things, and the success you win increases the selfish 
spirit, till at last you gain the world and lose your 
true being. All the way up the mountain of life you 
see nothing but one object. "No wayside beauty of the 
path attracts you ; those whom you meet do not draw 
you to their side in friendship, sincere and deep ; none 
of the bright interests which played around your early 
life and gave it variety and charm now touch your 
imagination. There is no denying that this life' is 
dull. One has a monotonous interest in going on, 
enough to keep one alive; or one has a fierce gam- 



Restoration of Liter ests and Poetry of Youth. 355 



bling interest, which . eats at the heart of life like the 
worm which dieth not, and wearies even more than 
dulness. But there is no true life — no harmonious 
movement of all the parts of the character onwards and 
together — no dramatic clash of opposed and changing 
feeling — no colour nor light made by the play of many 
trained faculties upon one another. The spirit of self 
has been the chief impulse, and naturally life is joyless. 
All thought has knotted itself round yourself and 
your family, and there is no feeling, freshening and. 
universal, such as is stirred in the heart when great 
human interests carry us out of self. True, you succeed. 
Self, self-devoted, is sure to win its object, and it forbids 
any dispersion of thought. But we have already said, 
touching on this subject, c that it may be well questioned 
whether a great success is not dearly purchased at the 
price of an imperfect manhood, whether success is the 
chief thing in life.' The man of only one set of ideas 
is only the fraction of a man, however he may have 
perfected that set of ideas. And the worst of it is that 
he becomes the bigoted worshipper of his own speciality, 
and the theologian and the scientific man mutually 
despise each other for blindness to the separate range of 
truths on which each insists, not seeing that as long as 
they despise any human interests whatsoever they are 
uncultured men. The manifold interests of their youth 
ought to be recalled, but at the same time they ought 
to be combined with necessary unity of aim. Youth 
teaches us diversity ; the first entrance , into middle 
age, concentration ; in later life we ought to combine 
both, to recover the interests of the one and to retain 



356 



The Afternoon of Life. 



the power of the other. I think one can do it best by 
the means of two great Christian ideas. One is 3 that, 
as God has called us to perfection, we are bound to 
ennoble our being from end to end, leaving no faculty 
untrained. The other is, that as Christ lived for man's 
cause, so should we. The first will force you to seek for 
manifold interests in order to make every branch of 
your nature grow ; the second will lift you out of the 
monotonous and limited region of self into the infinite 
world of ideas. 

So you will slowly get back the charm and variety of 
youth, only with an important difference. For for- 
merly you had no fixed object, and life was dissipated 
in pursuit of a number of changing objects. Now you 
have found your work, and that gives security and an- 
chorage to your character. You are fixed to a centre, 
but you radiate from it over a hundred fields of interests, 
and, living along each line, absorb from these fields a 
multitude of new ideas and feelings which vary while 
they strengthen your single aim. The new subjects 
which you take up and enjoy make you more complex 
in thought, more manifold in feeling, and, to your sur- 
prise, your real work does not suffer. For when your 
character widens you will obtain larger ideas of your 
special work, and do it more completely. The new 
knowledge and new thoughts are naturally brought to 
bear upon the main end, and its import expands, but 
not towards selfish aims. The high motive, that all 
life and all work is ultimately to be dedicated to the 
cause of man, carries you beyond any temporal or per- 
sonal aims, while it includes them. The pursuit of 



Restoration of Interests and Poetry of Youth. 357 



your life, whatever it may be, becomes idealised in the 
atmosphere of this motive and beautiful therein. An 
infinite tenderness and grace belongs to every work 
whose highest aim is the aim of Christ — the good of 
man. Life then becomes delightful, even of passionate 
interest, and the whole of being unfolds like a rose — 
full of colour, scent, and beauty. 

This is the restoration of manifold interests to life, 
and the consequent development of character. It is 
one of our highest Christian duties to seek it and 
attain it. 

2. Restoration of poetic feeling. 

We pass our youth in a glorious world. One has 
often dwelt upon the joy with which the child receives 
the tide of impressions which, wave after wave, comes 
in upon him from nature and from man. But they are 
received without thought, and they come too rapidry 
for feeling : each washes away the previous one. It is 
different when childhood has passed and the intellect and 
the heart are now developed in youth. As we then learn 
something of the long history of our race, and Greece 
and Rome and England become more than mere names 
to us, our enkindled intellect makes a hundred theories 
with regard to national ideas, their growth and their de- 
cay. We generalise, and delight in our generalisations. 
It seems almost degrading to the imaginative world in 
which we live to bring our glorious generalisations to 
the commonplace test of facts. At last a dim sus- 
picion begins to haunt us that our palaces have no 
foundation ; a scepticism, which we hate at first, forces 
us to prove our ideas ; and in a few weeks our unsub- 



358 



The Afternoon of Life. 



stantial vision dissolves, and we are left disenchanted* 
And now we resolve to be practical, and in a dry light 
to search for and to secure facts alone. 

It is the same with our life with nature. In youth 
all the world seemed alive. River, rock, and flower 
seemed to speak to one another, and to give us back love 
for the love with which we met them. We were bound 
to the universe, and the universe to us. All things 
lived in and for each other, and in the thought of 
the mutual love of all we saw and heard of all that 
nature gave to us, aiad we sent back in swift reci- 
procation — poetry and art were born within us, and 
we moved rejoicing in an atmosphere of beauty. A 
certain solemn awe amid the high solitudes of nature, 
an imaginative fear, as of a spirit in the air and sea, 
added to beauty a sense of sublimity. Then came the 
first touch of accurate knowledge to disperse our dream. 
Compelled to look at things one by one, we soon lost 
the poetic sense of them. It seemed absurd to think of 
the love of the stream to its meadows, of the bird to the 
flower. Life passed away from the universe, and we 
found ourselves face to face with a rigid force instead 
of a living spirit. Awe, and the terror which creates 
the sublime, vanished when we knew the reasons of 
things. A little study of electricity, and we soon 
lost the delightful awe with which we invested the 
thunderstorm. The colours and grace of the flower 
cle-narted as we divided its stamens and counted its 
petals. We classified it, and it became a name, and not 
a living thing. We smiled when we thought of our 
poetic world ; after all, it was very commonplace. We 



Restoration of Interests and Poetry of Youth. 359 

set ourselves to work to grope amid isolated facts, and 
all the loveliness of the world decayed. 

It is possible to settle down into this, to become the 
mere collector of historical facts, the mere investigator 
of the surface-life of nature, and for a time it is wise 
that we should go through this phase. But to remain 
in it to the end is unworthy of a man, an ignoble and 
a joyless life. We cannot be content with it. A pas- 
sionate desire stirs within us to find our poetry again, 
to realise in the history of man an organic unity of 
thought, to clothe the skeleton of nature with a living 
form. But not as before. We have now possession of 
facts, and we must build up our new world of beauty 
upon their foundations. In the old dreamland we can 
never live again, but we may live in an ideal and yet a 
true world ; we may restore the poetry of youth to our 
life in its relation both to Man and Nature. 

As to the first, there is no idea which will so rapidly 
guide us into a larger and more imaginative view of the 
history of man than the great Christian thought which 
we owe to Christ, that all the race is contained in 
God ; that all are bound together into unity in Him ; 
that as all are children of one Father, so all are bro- 
thers existing in and for the good of one another. 

It is impossible, then, to study any one age or any 
one nation as isolated from the rest. It is impos- 
sible, then, to think that anything is done by any 
nation which does not live in the whole race to influ- 
ence it for ever. Invisible bonds bind the whole of 
the past to the present and the future. We look upon 
nations as living organisms, which grow, and whoso 



360 



The Afternoon of Life. 



seeds wlieii they die spring up in other forms in other 
nations. "We rise to a still higher thought when we feel 
that the whole of Mankind is growing in the growth 
of its parts to a Divine end. 

Again, we become aware of a living will beneath the 
surface-movement of history. We see this Will, which 
we call God, in the immense power which individual 
men who have genius, and who we feel are inspired by a 
Divine idea, have upon history ; we see it also in the great 
ideas which influence nations and the race. We see that 
facts tell us nothing till we can show their relation to 
these ideas — that if we would know our race and its 
nations we must have, not only the annals, but a philo- 
sophy of history. At last, out of all this new thought 
there slowly emerges the majestic conception of one 
great Mankind growing up, century by century, into a 
higher, more complex life, and passing onwards to fulfil 
itself in union with the idea of God of which it is in 
time the manifestation. 

Thus, without losing our sense of the truth of facts, 
we get back our poetry. We live in a world grander 
and more beautiful than our youthful one, and every 
new fact we gain goes to swell the majesty of our con- 
ception. 

Again, in our relation to nature, we can get back what 
we have lost. There are different paths to this recovery, 
but none lead us to it more directly and rapidly than 
the true conception of God. Once we have realised the 
thought of One Divine Will as the centre of the universe, 
we can no longer' abide in the realm of unconnected 
facts. We feel they must be related to each other, 



Restoration of Interests and Poetry of Youth. 361 

and so related as to find themselves in order under a 
few ideas, which we maj call laws or what we please. 
Looking from our facts with this hope, we find at last, 
and directly through the help of the imagination, the 
great expressions of law which, tested by experiment, 
place us in a higher world of thought, no longer the 
mere collectors of facts, but the creators of an ordered 
universe. And now we hear no longer isolated notes, 
but the great symphony of nature — two or three themes 
infinitely varied, and the themes themselves so subtly 
connected in idea that all together they build up a 
palace of lovely and perfect harmony. This is the 
restoration in a truer form of the ideal majesty and 
the poetic feeling of our youth. And if we add to 
this another thought, which does not contradict the 
truth of science, but which is beyond its proof — that 
all things are filled with the life of God, and have their 
motions, organic and inorganic, in Him, being in fact 
forms of His thought and manifestations of His life — 
we get back still more completely our early poetry, 
without the untruthfulness which then ensured its 
death. The world, long dead to us, begins to live 
again. We begin to feel our union with it within the 
thought and life of God. We are fitted to it, and it to 
us; we receive beauty from it through a thousand 
sensible impressions ; we clothe it in new beauty by the 
work of our intellect and feeling upon it. The same 
living Spirit moves in us and in it, and binds us to it, 
till we feel towards mountain, cloud, and stream, and 
every lively spot upon its surface, a feeling which 
partakes of personal friendship and affection. More- 



362 



The Afternoon of Life. 



over, though, the form of the thought is changed, we 
get back, through the higher science, our old imagina- 
tion that the things of nature love each other and live 
for each other. There is a true intercourse between, 
air and flowers. Flowers do really breathe. The air 
gives its carbonic acid to the plant, the plant gives 
back oxygen to the air. The sun is as truly the great 
giver of life and force and joy in the world of nature 
as in that of the imagination. And these are but a 
few instances, out of a multitude, of the infinite 
association of all things. We are not really wrong 
when w r e say that all things live by giving and re- 
ceiving of each other's good. 

This is the restoration of poetic feeling to our man- 
hood. It is a noble thing to reach ; it dignifies life to 
the very close. It dignified the life of him * who has 
lately, full of years and honour, passed away from us, 
who was laid last week in the silent Abbey beside one 
greater than he, but not more, pure of heart, more 
faithful to God and to his work, more full of high 
enthusiasm for knowledge, and of delight therein. He 
kept to the end that eternal childhood which is the 
special grace, and perhaps the special power, of genius. 
Through accurate science he had reached the true 
poetical life with nature, and his old age had greater 
pleasure in the beauty of the world than his boyhood. 
Building up by philosophic thought the palace of the 
universe, he filled it with the love and feeling which all 
the loveliness of the universe stirred within his heart. 



* Sir John Herschel. 



Restoration of Interests and Poetry of Youth. 363 



Disdaining nothing, -finding in all things interest and 
delight, he gave as much thought and rapture to the 
fungi of the wayside hedge as he gave of old to the 
southern stars in those four years of lonely work nigh 
to the Cape of Storms. Nor did he miss the higher and 
more poetic thought which made the universe, whose 
laws he knew, not the slave of law, bnt alive with the 
spirit and wisdom of God. He rejoiced to see, not 
force alone, but a Divine will moving in all things ; and 
so it came to pass that his ' common thoughts were 
piety, and his life gratitude.' He wore his learning 
6 lightly as a flower,' and wore it as the gift of God. 
And as I refer in thought to the beginning of this 
sermon, I see that it was given to him to illustrate 
that life of manifold interests which leaves no power 
undeveloped. He was not enslaved to one branch of 
science, nor to science alone. W e know over how many 
fields of natural philosophy he went his way, but it is 
with special pleasure that we think of the wise old man 
recalling in age the interests of youth, and finding in 
his translation of Homer the charm of the earlier Greek 
world encompassing him with the old poetic life. It is 
with equal interest that in the scholar we find the 
patriot, and hear that it was his voice which in his 
village stirred tha youths to take up with eagerness 
the volunteer movement of England. 

He died, having finished his work faithfully, and 
with youthful ardour, to ^he end — a man who had 
developed all the powers which God had given him, and 
who rendered them up with humility and faith to God 
again : not indeed to die here in our memory, or 



3^4 



The A fternoon of L ife. 



there, where he has gone to cease his labour or to lose 
his delight. For, for such as he, in that ampler world 
there is ampler work, in that lovelier world ther.e is 
higher pleasure. 

Yes, brethren, for those who choose growth and not 
stagnation, for those who win back, in reverence for 
their own nature and fer the idea of God within them, 
the dreams of youth in a truer and nobler manner, and 
add their realisation to the steady work of manhood — 
for those who believe that God wishes them to be 
perfect, and strive to grow into that perfection — for 
those who do not cease to aspire, while they work 
within their limits, growth does not cease, it goes on 
for ever. For them the promise of my text is true — 
their youth is renewed like the eagle's. 



The A ftemoon of Life. 



3^5 



THE AFTERNOON OF LIFE. 

THE RESTORATION OF OUR IDEAL OF MAN. 

' Lord, what is man, that thou art mindful of him ? and the son of 
man, that thou yisitest him ? For thou hast made him a little lower 
than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.' — 
Psalm viii. 4, 5. 

The twofold view taken of man in these verses is 
remarkable. The Psalmist begins by depreciation. Is 
man worthy of the care of God ? Can this creature, 
whose time passeth away like a shadow, in himself a 
thing of nought, engage the thought and tenderness 
of God? And in truth, this is often our bitterest 
feeling. It seems, at times, when the hopes which 
were once so bright have faded from our skies, that 
God takes no pride in us, that we and all our long-, 
weary effort are nothing to His heart. 

But neither we nor the Psalmist can con tin ue to 
maintain that view. We feel that it is one-sided. We 
learn that God does care for us, that He has some pride 
in the creatures He has sent forth from Himself. We 
pass from*the lowly to the exalted view, and in com- 
bining both we find the whole truth. What is man ? 
Nothing, it is true, but also, a little lower than the 
angels, crowned with glory and honour, having domi- 



366 The A ft er noon of L ife. 

nion over all the earth. The lowlier view belongs 
often to our manhood, the ideal view to our youth, 
the combination of both ought to belong to our later 
years. 

In the progress from childhood to later manhood, a 
portion of which subject we treated last Sunday, our 
view of man changes as much as our view of nature. 
We begin with a lofty but dreamy ideal of the good- 
ness and glory of Man, and the dream often lasts 
through our youth. We pass at the beginning of 
middle age into a period when our dream is shattered 
by disappointment. We are cheated, we come into 
contact with false friendship, we discover the vast 
extent of evil in mankind, and we are in danger of 
settling down into scorn, or indifference to men. It 
would be a miserable groove of thought in which to* 
run down into the grave. But God has provided some 
better thing for us. Slowly our early ideal is restored 
in another way. We gain a wiser, truer, more chari- 
table view of our race. We take into it the lessons 
learnt during the time of our disappointment, and yet 
we find man crowned with glory and honour. The 
crown is mingled with dark weeds, and thorns are 
among its gold and jewels, but after all it is a crown. 

This, then, is our subject to-day — the restoration, in 
the later years of middle-age, of the ideal of mankind. 

But, first, we must trace the growth of our ideal 
through childhood and youth. It takes its earliest form 
through home. Our mother's care and love ; our father's 
watchfulness ; the less deep, but natural kindness of ser- 
vants; the joy of holidays, when everyone seems to live 



The Restoration of ottr Ideal of M an. 367 

to amuse us ; the pleasant association with our brothers, 
sisters, and childish friends, sufficiently varied by quar- 
rels, like April showers, to be interesting, create in us 
an ideal of mankind. All are loving, true, and faithful 
to us, sheltered as we are from wrong in the enclosed 
garden of home. 

As we pass into boyhood, still innocent, the transient 
sorrows and betrayals which we suffer do not touch us 
with great pain. Our feelings are not deep enough to 
risk much on one person, nor to lose much if we are 
disappointed. Our sense of moral right is not keen 
enough to suffer much from untruthfulness, nor to know 
how evil, evil is. We still believe in men. 

Again, nature helps us to idealise man. We see man 
through the nature we love, and add to our half-formed 
conception of him the sublimity, beauty, or peace of 
the scenes in which we find him. Those who have 
been young in the midst of the orchards and cool 
gardens of mid-England, will remember how they trans- 
ferred the sweetness and calm of nature to the life of 
the labourer without seeing its evil and its misery. 
Those who have lived among sterner scenes, where 
man, as in the shepherd-life among the mountains, has 
to contend with awful forces, where every rocky gorge 
and torrent has its tale of human suffering or human 
daring, will recall how their imagination worked till 
man became in thought sublime — a living creature 
moving as a master among the powers of nature till he 
was seen as one of them. This was the experience of 
Wordsworth's boyhood. Man was c ennobled outwardly 
oefore his sight. 3 



3 68 



The A fternoon of L ife. 



It is thus that our ideal grows, from the direct 
influence of home, and from the transference of the 
beauty, passion, and power of nature to those who live 
among nature. 

We dream of a perfect humanity. 

And it is a thing to bless God for to begin life in this 
way, to start with belief in the nobleness of our race : 

Were it otherwise, 
And we found evil fast as we find good 
In our first years, or think that it is found, 
How could the innocent heart bear up and live ? 

Happy is the man who has had in childhood true hearts 
and loving hands about him in his home ; happy he, 
whose inexperienced thoughts have first communed 
with man through the fair and sublime things of nature. 
For his face is turned towards the truth, his preposses- 
sions are of that kind 

Without which the soul 
Eeceives no knowledge that can bring forth good. 

~No sight of evil afterwards, of misery, of meanness, can 
ever blot wholly out of his mind hope for the race and 
belief in goodness. He can say, when the first bitter- 
ness of disappointment is over, c Well, all this is evil, 
but there must be a seed of good ; all this is vile, but 
there is worthiness if I could find it — for I have known 
a loving home, I have felt true reverence for man.' 

Nor, indeed, though much of its simplicity is lost, is 
our ideal of man lost as long as youth lasts. We are 
then too full of life to look at death, too full of hope 
to believe in the victory of wrong, too ready for new 
friends and new interests to care much for the loss of a 



The Restoration of our Ideal of Alan. 369 

few : we have so much, faith in men that we can afford 
to part with some, and not recognise that we are the 
poorer. 

Moreover, books open to us their wondrous world. 
We find our heroes, heroes of war and religion, of daring 
adventure and self-sacrifice. The poets and artists 
seize on us, and man grows beautiful in their pages and 
their work. Yast thoughts of a march, of nations, of the 
terrible games they play, of their mighty rise and fall, 
of the causes and the ideas millions have struggled 
for and of the passions involved, swell into sublimity 
our idea of man, till at last nature becomes second and 
man first, the central thing of the universe, dust, yet 
akin to godhead, shortlived as the flitting of the shuttle 
through, the loom, but crowned with glory and honour, 
and all things in subjection under his feet. 

No one can say that this ideal lasts. It does not bear 
contact with the world. It is a dream, and we wake to 
lose it. But in our loss of it, we fall into the other 
extreme. "We have as mean an opinion of man as we 
had a lofty one, and our question is, is that mean 
opinion the right one ; is it fit that we should possess 
it to the close ? Or can we get back our ideal in a 
truer and a soberer fashion, and die with faith and 
hope for man, with love for him ruling* our thoughts 
and action ? That question we may answer by tracing 
some of the ways in which we lose our youthful ideal 
and find it again, a different, but a securer thing. 

Youth is scarcely over before a certain weariness of 
our enthusiasm creeps over us. We have worked it 
so hard that its sources are exhausted for a time. The 



37o 



The Afternoon of Life. 



light and colour fade away from many things, and we 
turn upon them, with a kind of anger because they give 
us no more the pleasure we once received. Then we 
begin to play with a kind of cynicism ; we sa} r , emotion 
is dead and youth is past, and that all things are indif- 
ferent. But there is little reality in our talk, for we are 
as full of emotion and of life as before. It is simply that 
we are tired of the part of enthusiasm, and we want to 
play another part and make our life a little more dra- 
matic. W e are not yet disenchanted, but still this sort 
of thing prepares us for disenchantment. We are ready 
now, in this half-contempt of enthusiasm, when we get 
any proof of the badness of men, to think badly of Man. 

Moreover, we have really lost the grand abstract 
thought of man which we won from knowledge of books 
and art. The little vices and follies of the university or 
society, their ' bustling passions, 5 the small and idle 
characters we meet, the petty interests of the common 
world in which we move before we enter on the work of 
manhood, all tend to break up the general thought of 
mankind into its petty particulars. The grand concep- 
tion of the whole race, and of nations, as impersonated 
in thought, fades away, and we find ourselves forced to 
look upon a series of small persons. We drop from 
our ideal heights. 

Then comes the entrance into real life, into the work 
of manhood or womanhood, abroad or at home, and our 
disillusion begins. We find life harder than we thought, 
and men and women very different from our ideal. We 
are in the midst of those who repudiate enthusiasm as 
unpractical, to whom self-interest is the first law, and 



The Restoration of our I deal .of Man. 371 



whose rule is to suspect rather than to trust. Every-* 
thing goes to overthrow our dream of a high Humanity. 
Our aspirations and hopes are ridiculed, and we join, 
after a time, in the ridicule. We are cheated and over- 
reached in business, or made a tool of in society, and it 
is well if we do not join by and by in the same sort of 
work, and deal to others the measure we have received. 
We thought men would help us when we desired to 
help them, give way to us when we had right on 
our side, be honourable with us as we with them, and 
we find many as hard and cold as granite, and who 
will neither help, nor give way to right, nor be just, 
if ifc goes against their personal interest. And we 
whisper to ourselves, 6 We will go with the stream ; 
why should not self-interest be our law also ? All are 
equally bad, why should we adopt a higher standard of 
justice, love, and honour than the rest ? Should we do so 
in this whirling tide, where every atom pushes the other 
out of its way, we shall never succeed.' And then the 
work is done, and the noble image youth presented of 
mankind changes into an ugly idol. 

A still bitterer blow awaits us often. We have had 
a friend, man or woman. He represented to us man- 
kind, he embodied for us all our youthful dreams of 
faithfulness, honour, and devotion. With him all the 
world was fair, things done with him had twofold 
worth. Our trust in him was full and clear, and we 
should have taken his cause as ours against the world. 
When, all in the turn of an hour, we find him false as 
hell, mean, one who has used our love for his own ends, 
who never gave back one feeling to us that was not 



37 2 T? ie Afternoon of Life. 

feigned, who laughed in his sleeve at our trust, and had 
not merit enough to be ashamed of his baseness. 

With that, the house of life falls in the most hateful 
ruin round us. We are soured at the heart. ( All are as 
mean and false as he,' we cry in our first passion. We 
hate and scorn ourselves for our blindness, and this 
gives to our bitterness a keener sting. We doubt our 
other friends, we even doubt ourselves ; truth and good- 
ness seem to us but cunning forms of ill, and as we 
think of our youth, and its ideal of man, our laugh is 
half of scorn and half of shame. 

Are we to settle down into these things? Is this 
contempt of men, and the selfishness and isolation 
it engenders, the atmosphere which we shall breathe 
through manhood to old age 9 God forbid ! — there is 
no outward misery which would not be blessedness in 
comparison with that. Nor does the Father of love 
leave us in this bitter land. In some hour when the 
heart is softened, we become aware of the lesson of 
the cross of Christ. Some simple event, in which we 
have to act for others, calls us out of our selfishness, and 
we are as it were surprised into self-devotion. In a 
moment of impulse, we forget ourselves for a child, a 
woman, or an acquaintance. At first we smile at the 
return of enthusiasm, and half despise ourselves for our 
unpractical effort. But the sweetness of the thing 
makes its way. We have felt the attractive power of 
the cross. He who was lifted up for men draws us to 
his life by making us partakers of the joy of sacrifice. 
We feel not, as in youth, a pleasure for which we can 
give no reason, but pleasure which seems founded on a 



The Restoration of our Ideal of M %n. 373 

law, for the more we give up for others, the deeper and 
the purer is, we find, our pleasure. 

And in the light of this revelation, we whisper to our 
heart, 6 The maxim of the world is wrong, self-interest 
is not the first thing. I have found men bad because 
my rule of life was evil. I will live for others now. I 
will try what love, and trust, and the ignoring of wrong 
to myself will do towards restoring my ancient joy.' 

It is wonderful how men change to a changed heart. 
We ourselves being ennobled, see noble things, and 
loving, find out love. Little touches of goodness, of 
courage, of love in men, which, formerly, looking for 
perfection, we passed by, now attract us like flowers 
beside a dusty highway. We take them as keys to the 
character, and door after door flies open to us. The 
man reveals the treasures of his heart. We find aspira- 
tion, penitence, tenderness, in those we thought gro- 
velling, hard, and selfish. We trust men, we throw 
ourselves upon the good in them, and they become 
better now that they are not suspected of being evil. 

Driven by our new principle to search for good and 
not evil, and to find it in all, we take notice of ordi- 
nary men whom we have passed over, and it is with an 
exquisite surprise that we become conscious of the 
vast amount of daily sacrifice done by common men 
and women, by those whom we call dull, by those who 
have to fight a hard battle like the poor ; of the high 
service performed to God in many a simple heart, that, 
like a mountain chapel on the wayside, can shelter only 
humble worshippers. Delighted we pursue our quest. 
Each day unveils something good, and at last our ideal 



374 



The Afternoon of Life. 



is restored again, sunlight breaks again upon the land- 
scape of humanity. Only we see the real thing now, 
and not the dream. We see evil with the good, we 
see struggle, frequent failure as well as victory, but we 
have a manly sympathy with the struggle, and a belief 
that failure will be repaired through God, in whom, 
through our knowledge of the goodness of man, we are 
now, at last, beginning to believe. We do not expect 
too much or demand too much, for we know now what 
human weakness means ; we make allowances, we have 
patience to wait, we suffer long and are kind, and by 
and by we are rewarded by finding that we have led a 
soul out of selfishness into charity, out of weakness 
into power. And so a softer, sweeter, humbler life 
becomes ours ; an infinite and tender hope for man 
swells in our heart ; and slowly there grows up a new # 
ideal, a new picture of Mankind, truer than our youth- 
ful one, further off, but built on deep foundations hidden 
in the guiding tenderness of a Father of men whom 
we have learned, through the spirit of the Saviour in 
our hearts, to trust with His own children. 

Then, also, the bitterness of that first betrayal of 
friendship passes away. We feel it shameful to make 
the lie of one prove the lie of all ; we feel it an insolence 
done to mankind to condemn all men because one has 
put gall into our heart. Even the hatred which we 'felt 
at first for the deceiver passes at last into a kind of 
distant pity for one who was so empty-hearted as to 
betray. We hate the treachery, we cannot quite hate 
the traitor. We never admit him to touch our hand 
again, but we forgive him and pass on. 



The Restoration of our Ideal of Man. 3 75 

For we should feel it disgraceful to be so overcome 
by our disappointment as to drop for ever the bright 
conception of our youth or to wholly disbelieve in friend- 
ship because one friendship has been foolish. It is the 
traitor who is degraded, not we. At the hour of his 
worst trial, all forsook and fled the Saviour. But He 
met them after his death as if nothing had happened. 
One, indeed, went to his own place. For so deep a 
treachery there was no forgiveness in this world. But 
Christ recognised the weakness of the rest, and. forgave. 
He did not distrust all human goodness, or even theirs, 
because they had once wretchedly failed. 

Looking on that, we recover our ideal of human 
nature, our heart opens to new friendships, and we find, 
taught by our experience, friends who at least are true. 
We prove them, and though we discover dross amid 
the gold, somehow the dross enhances the value of the 
gold. And as the friendship grows it loses its little- 
ness, and becomes at last, chastened by many mutual 
trials, something on which we can rely for life and 
death. Our old ideal is restored, and we can trust it 
now. 

Once more, that youthful ideal, won from history 
and art, of the grandeur of the whole race and its 
career, is rudely overthrown when life brings us as men 
into contact with the evils of great cities, with the sins 
of nations and governments, with, perhaps, things 
horrible in the history of our own time. The first 
shock, when our early conception of womanhood is over- 
thrown in a great city, is followed by a hundred others. 
We become aware of whole masses of society living in 



376 



The Afternoon of Life. 



habitual crime, and apparently condemned to it by an 
iron fate. Still more miserable when, having loved 
national freedom and just government, we see them 
violated for many years, men degraded and accepting 
their degradation, the gulf between classes deepened, 
and such seeds of hatred sown, that at last, in an hour 
of demoralisation, that which has torn all our hearts 
for the last week takes place — madness, despair, and 
anarchy on one side, fierce and hateful* vengeance on 
the other — the queen of European cities consumed by 
her own children and her streets choked with the dead, 
brothers slain by brothers, till we turn away sick with 
pity for miserable man, sick with pain for that which 
will be brought in charge hereafter against the sacred 
name of liberty. Our ideal of humanity is stained with 
evil or made dark with blood. 

And is it in this that we are to die ? is this the dread- 
ful faith by which we are to live ? When old age has 
made the pulse beat less warmly, are we to look back 
upon the glorious thought of our growth, and weep for 
its ruin, bitterly ? Not so ! the wisdom and patience 
of Christ restore a more sober view, give back the light, 
and reawake the hope. The soul inevitably reacts from 
so profound a gloom, but a sense of awful mystery and 
power remains, born out of the very horror and sin, 
and broods in our imagination over the race of man. 
And the mystery and power give us a strange suspicion 
that that which could sin so deeply must be capable 
of high goodness and greatness. It cannot be, we 
think, that there is not another side to the affairs of 
men. Then, knowing the evil, we recall the good. 



The Restoration of our Ideal of Man. 377 



There have been times when men and nations have 
toiled and died gloriously for great causes and great 
ideas ; when, in some high national sacrifice, a people 
have shaken off their evil and proved that man has 
glory and honour for his crown, when freedom and 
truth have triumphed. There are things which show 
still that God has not forgotten men, that He still 
reveals Himself in them as truth and justice, still cares 
and works for them ; times when, as last year, a long 
tyranny went down with a crash, and the hearts of all 
men leaped for joy. And, thinking of these things, 
there suddenly start up before us, alit with our new- 
born hope, the great Christian ideas which Christ re- 
vealed in life and died for on the cross, and the spirit of 
which was poured out like fire on men on the day of 
Pentecost — the idea of the fatherhood of God, and there- 
fore of the childhood of all the race — the idea of the 
brotherhood of mankind, to be fulfilled at last — the idea 
of a Mankind made divine in Christ, and therefore in 
fact destined hereafter to reach, collectively and man by 
man, through ages of progressive education, the divine 
perfection now secured for it in God. And grasping 
with our greatest faith these things as truth, our vague 
hopes are strengthened, and in spite of selfishness and 
crime, of the horror and pity of the tragedy, we dare to 
renew our ideal in a wiser way.* We know now the awful 
facts of human life, and yet do not despair. We take 
with us the troubled human heart of the prophet, and 
yet we prophesy the resurrection of nations from guilt, 
and of mankind from evil. Below the storms which 
toss its wild waves to n?aven in anarchy of waters 
17 



3 7 8 The A ft er no on of L ife. 



we look into the central heart of the ocean of humanity, 
and see its slow current moving on to good. A vaster, 
nobler idea of man rises before us : not the sinless, 
peaceful ideal of our youth, but the idea of the Titan, 
Mankind, possessed by indestructible good, struggling 
onwards from age to age against his defectiveness and 
his evil towards perfection, worn with a myriad sorrows, 
stained by a thousand wars, his mighty brow furrowed 
with the thoughts and passions of centuries, his heart 
beating with love which renews its youth eternally, 
with dark hatreds too, which mark his weary steps 
with blood ; and yet never relaxing his onward march, 
never, wholly unconscious of the good within him, never 
wholly false to his immortal destiny, never forsaken of 
God, but accomplishing from generation to generation, 
in a thousand different forms, but through the union of 
all in one work of progress and development, that single 
aim of perfection which God had in His mind for the 
Eace when He created Man in His own image and 
endowed him with the passion for perfection. It is 
thus that we get back our ideal, different indeed, not 
so much beautiful as- sublime, not filling our hearts 
with idle joy, but penetrating them with a glorious 
expectation. 

And now, we move, as in the presence of majestic 
sorrow and effort, among our brothers with bated breath 
and loving footstep. The awe of the vast struggle, the 
infinite variety of the great drama, ad(^ dignity and 
solemnity to our life. A faith which exalts the heart and 
leads to devotion to the human cause enters into our 
heart, when we feel that alfMankind from century to 



The Restoration of our Ideal of Man. 379 



century is working out in form the idea of God, and 
must complete it. Patience makes the soul calm, for 
the vastness of the conception we now possess of man 
reconciles us to the slowness of his progress ; and out of 
the thought of it all, and of dwelling on it all — on all the 
suffering, toil, mystery, and victory, and the immortal 
renewing of them century after century — a fountain of 
love and tenderness rises in the heart to soften, sweeten, 
and fertilise life ; and within, an infinite hope for man, 
half rapturous as we look forward, but now in our so- 
bered hearts balanced by the c pathetic truth ' of life, 
makes divine our decaying years, and blesses death 
with the faith of Simeon, 6 Lord, now lettest Thou thy 
servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy 
salvation.' 



38o 



The After 7io on of Life, 



THE AFTERNOON OF LIFE. 

THE KESTOKATION OP BELIEF. 

1 I shall go softly all my years in the bitterness of my soul.' 
Isaiah xxxviii. *15. 

We have spoken for two Sundays past of that second 
half of man's middle age, when he settles down for life 
into his groove ; when, beginning to descend the hill 
towards the graveyard in the valley, he will not change 
much more, except through the changes which decay 
brings. We asked the solemn question of ourselves, 
into what we had settled — into hardness or tenderness 
of heart, into width or narrowness of view, into sus- 
picion of men or that wisdom of charity which beareth, 
believeth, and hopeth all things of men. We saw that 
we had found, after many oscillations, the work of our 
life, that central point to which our will directed all our 
faculties. We asked ourselves what spirit dwelt in 
that central point — the spirit of self, or the spirit of 
Christ ; tne spirit whose wages is death, or the spirit 
whose gift is the eternal life of love. 

We found that the peculiar dangers of this settling 
down which marks the second period of middle-age 
were the destruction of youthful ideals, on the ground 
that we had found them to be unpractical, and the 



The Restoration of Belief. 381 



destruction of our youthful belief iu the goodness of 
men, on the ground that we had been disappointed, 
deserted, and cheated ; so that we fell in the first case 
into an unpoetical materialism, and in the second into 
indifference to human interests, and hardness of heart. 
It became a question then how we might escape from 
this hardness of heart and recover, but in a wiser way, 
all that was noble in our youth. We traced the resto- 
ration of our poetic feeling towards nature. We traced 
the recovery of our ideal of humanity, but we left the 
third untouched — the restoration of belief. This will 
form our subject to-day. 

In the especial case of Hezekiah, belief was restored 
by a great shock which brought him into contact with 
reality. He had been living, as many of us live, a 
pleasant, prosperous life, till he had really grown to 
believe that this world and its interests were the only 
things worth caring for. The shadows and mockeries 
in which he moved grew more and more substantial 
in the way we know so well. His treasures, his art 
collections, the beauty of his palace, made him love his 
life and dream that it was not a dream — when suddenly 
he was brought into contact with the actual things 
which lie beneath the apparent. God appeared to him, 
not as to Adam in the cool of the day, but as He came 
to Job, in the whirlwind and the eclipse, and Hezekiah 
knew that he had been living in a vain show. The 
answer of his soul was quick and sad : c By these things 
men live, O Lord 3 ' these are the blows which teach 
men what life really is. But careless prosperity had 



382 



The Afternoon of Life. 



done its demoralising work on him. There is a certain 
unmanly softness in his utterance which speaks of one 
whose will had been enervated by a dilettante life, who 
never, as long as he lived, would have again firmness 
in thought, or decision in action. 

Many of you are prosperous, happy, and at ease in this 
great city. It will be wise for you to remember that 
thoughtless prosperity weakens the fibre of the soul. 
When one is accustomed to gratify on the spur of the 
moment every wish, to buy everything that strikes 
one's fancy, to live only from day to day, and not from 
idea to idea, then the directive power of the will and 
the restraining power of the conscience, and even the 
distinguishing power of the intellect, are all weakened, 
and when that inevitable shock comes, whatever it may 
be — for you cannot escape the common fate — you meet 
it as an untrained man meets a sudden call upon his 
muscular strength — in a soft, exhausted manner. It is 
true you are redeemed from carelessness, you become a 
servant of God, a believer in the eternal, but you never 
become the veteran of the cross ; there is always a tinge 
of unmanliness in your Christianity. You go softly, 
there is in your soul that bitterness which marks the 
weak man. 

The blow which sobered Hezekiah was a common 
one. It did nothing more than bring him face to face 
with death. The process whereby his dependence on 
God was restored was uncomplicated. But there are 
far worse shocks than this, and recovery from them 
into a godlike life is long and dreadful. There are 
things which at first seem to annihilate belief and 



The Restoration of Belief. 3 S3 

change an indifferent or a happy nature into earnest, 

even savage, bitterness. 

One of these is the advent of irrecoverable disease — 

protracted weakness, or protracted pain. Suddenly 

the victim is stayed in the midst of life and isolated 

in his chamber ; or he looks forward and knows that 

there is nothing but pain between him and death. 

God forgives our human anger then, but we speak 

roughly to Him at first. We challenge Him for unfair 

treatment, we ask what we have done, we demand if 

this is the boasted love of a Father : we curse our day. 

It is a dark anger, and may grow in intensity till faith 

and love are lost for this life — but it will not reach 

that point if we have some greatness of soul, if we are 

open to the touch of human love. For, though we are 

angry with God, we are not angry with our home and 

with our friends. Our misfortune brings round us all 

the ministering of common human tenderness ; we meet 

• 

with exquisite sympathies, with love which renews its 
flower each da} 7 , with infinite delicacy of thought from 
men. Our sympathy is kindled in return, the bitter 
fount of tears grows sweet, we can only repay the love 
we receive by the self-restraint which hinders com- 
plaint and keeps us from giving trouble. And then 
slowly the soul becomes alive to love ; a delicate sen- 
sitiveness to human affection takes possession of the 
heart ; unselfishness is the element it breathes ; a noble 
patience becomes the habit of the spirit : and through 
the benign influence of human love the first step 
towards the restoration of belief has been made, the 
soil is prepared for the work of the Spirit of God 



384 The A fternoon of Life. 

And then, one day, the gospel story in all its sweet 
simplicity attracts and softens the sufferer's heart. He 
reads of Christ. He also, the only begotten Son, suf- 
fered, and yet the heavenly Father loved Him well. 
'Perhaps I too,' he says, c may be God's son, my suffer- 
ing too in some strange manner may be a portion of His 
love to me and to my fellow-men.' The thought trans- 
figures pain — an ineffable, inexplicable rush of tender- 
ness takes place. We know not why we should love 
God. We only know we do. In that hour a bond is 
made which eternity cannot dissolve ; the child finds a 
Father, and the soul is saved. 

And, afterwards, one other thought, the parent of 
many consolations, adds its beauty to his inner life. 
He reads that Christ's suffering in self-sacrifice brought 
redemption unto man. Surely, . he seems to dream, 
that is no isolated fact. It represents what all self- 
sacrifice is doing. 'And I, if I bear with love and 
patience, may also, through my pain, be saving men, 
may fill up that which is behindhand of the suffer- 
ings of Christ, may carry on that enduring sacrifice by 
which the race is saved. On the wings of that idea, 
my solitary life is raised into a region of joy and 
triumph. I too, in my apparent uselessness, am at one 
with the Great Labourer. I am not alone. I have 
ties which unite me to my brethren ; my suffering links 
me to the whole race ; I bear with Christ my cross for 
men.' 

This is not only the restoration of belief — it is the 
victory of life. 

But there are more dreadful shocks than that of long 



The Restoration of Belief. 



385 



disease. There is that shipwreck which conies of dis- 
honoured love. Many things are terrible, but none is 
worse than this. To have had the whole of being dis- 
solved in one cup, filled, it once seemed to us, with 
waters pure as the heaven, whose very touch made life 
divine ; and then to find that they were poison, which 
infected and then consumed — this is the bitterness of 
death held in the intensity of life ; and this, in a world 
which looks so fair, is the fate of many who perish of 
pain and make no sign. 

There is nothing so full of ghastly irony on earth 
as the way in which the fate of a man or woman's 
life is often cast on a single die, risked in a single 
moment ; and when the root of love from whence grows 
all the beauty and fruit of the tree of life is bitten 
through and through, what remains ? 

When all desire at last, and all regret, 
Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain ; — 
What shall assuage the unforgotten pain, 
And teach the unforgetf ul to forget ? 

For some there is no remedy but death and far be- 
yond, the immanent tenderness of God ; and these die 
in the burning sand — poor children, cast like tender- 
coloured shells, too fair and delicate for so rough a 
treatment, high up upon the beach by the rude storm. 
For others, they live on in a devouring memory ; all the 
perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten that little spot of 
life for many years. And the memory poisons all belief 
in God. It is the wickedest thing in the world to 
corrupt and dishonour human love, for those who do it 
destroy the faith of those they injure in the love of God 



3 86 



The Afternoon of Life. 



and the kindness of men. In this world the restoration 
of their belief seems often beyond the great Healer's 
power. The wound has been too wide and deep. 

But there are many who recover, whom God leads 
out of the desert into the still garden of an evening life 
of peace and usefulness, and even joy. Can we at all 
trace how this may be ? 

Lapse of time does part of the work. If they are 
strong of nature — strong to endure as strong to suffer — 
if they have enough faith, not to believe in love, for that 
may be too much to ask as yet, but only enough not to 
deny love ; if they can wait, even with their faces down 
in the sour grass of life — the soothing hand of time 
touches the bitterness and it slowly dies away. But it 
does not touch the memory of love. In the quietude of 
middle-life we look back upon our early misery and only 
remember the love we felt. The cruelty, the pain, the 
fear have become, not overmastering presences, but phan- 
toms which are drifting away. Our love was wasted, 
was dishonoured as a gift, but in itself it was beautiful, 
pure, and true, and it remains what it was. 6 It was 
sweet to have given all away, it was passionate pain to 
have the gift thrown aside and trodden down 5 but that 
pain has passed, and now only the sweetness of having 
given remains with me.' 

That exquisite experience, one not rarely felt, so 
divine is this nature of ours, is the point on which the 
heavenly Father seizes — c Yes ! my child,' He says, 6 it 
is no dishonour to have given and not to have received; 
it is the very essence of my honour, the long experience 
of my life with men. Your bitter trial has been uncon- 



The Restoration of Belief. 



387 



sciously the image of ray longsuffering.' It touches the 
soul home, to feel that when -we thought ourselves 
furthest from God, we were unconsciously nearest to 
Him; that when our human love was set at nought, we 
were closest to Him who loves against rejection and 
neglect. And when God speaks to us in this way, He 
speaks that which Christ acted among men. He, too, 
gave all and received nothing. Pouring infinite love 
on men, they despised and rejected Him. But nothing 
could change his tenderness into hardness, nor turn 
his charity into gall. When all his sacrifice had been 
dishonoured, He bent his head and prayed, 6 Father, 
forgive them, for they know not what they do.' 

And you are saved, faith is restored, hope is re- 
newed, the root of love reknits its fibres, the tree of life 
puts on again its robe of foliage, recovers all its fruits, 
and souls are redeemed by the results of your bitter 
experience, when, like Christ, you can turn and say," 
Father, forgive him, Father, forgive her, for they knew 
not what they did. 

Once more, there have been and are many of us, who 
are conscious that as we have passed into the later 
period of life and mingled with the world, our early 
faith has also passed away. To all thoughtful men this 
is no slight shock. 

Our young religion (and I speak of no uncommon 
• thing) was not only unquestioning but often enthusiastic. 
It depended much on those whom we loved. For the 
young believe through their affections, and their faith is 
coloured by their heart. Not unfrequently, especially 



3 88 



The A fternoon of Life. 



within the last five-and-twenty years, when so many 
religions movements had leaders born to attract youth, 
the religion of men has been one of exalted devotion 
or of poetic sentiment. But, depending much on the 
personal influence of special men, and not on personal 
union with God, depending more on human direction 
than on individual consciousness of a Father won 
through unshared and original effort, it became sub- 
ject, when inevitable circumstance did away with the 
direct influence of which I speak, to reaction. The 
youth left the university, the girl left her home, and 
met with a multitude of varying currents of opinion. 
New views, embodying larger aims, bringing their 
hearers more into contact with the race but bound up 
with antichristian developments of thought, loosened 
the ties of old religious associations and led us un- 
consciously to despise the piety of the past as illiberal, 
sentimental, or ignorant. Our religious feelings, which 
had been without us and not within, slowly and neces- 
sarily died away. The war of criticism and of science, 
the endless debates, the eagerness of intellectual dis- 
cussion which rage around subjects once venerated and 
dear, insensibly diminished their spiritual power on 
us, for feeling grows cold in an atmosphere of dialec- 
tics. The tone of our society, the very literary or pro- 
fessional work in which we were involved, the friends 
whom we had made, the drift of the current of our 
life, all combined to overthrow the building of our early 
faith. "We became more and more liberal, but we also 
became more and more unbelieving. Finally, the day 
arrived when the last tie which bound us to the religion 



The Restoration of Belief. 389 

of our youth was severed by some touch of the knife of 
circumstance, and we realised on the sudden, with a 
shock which startled us, that our soul was empty. 

It is deep distress at first, and we strive to recreate 
the past, to clothe our life again with the worn-out 
garments. But that must fail — all retrograde move- 
ments do. It does more than fail, it produces an 
absolute repulsion from the old, and we swing back into 
positive unbelief. We have been touching the dead, and 
its touch is loathsome, however dear it was. We bury 
it out of our sight now, and we are left naked of our 
faith. 

Are we to settle down into that ? Is that the groove 
in which, now that the hair is growing thin upon our 
temples and the shadow of the grave draws near, we 
wish to run down to the end ? Are we truly, entirely 
content to commit our whole wondrous life to the 
embrace of nothingness ? Is that the lame and impo- 
tent conclusion at which, after years of interwoven 
feeling and exhaustive thought, and of effort rising day 
by day like the sun, we have finally arrived ? Is that 
the thing we persuade ourselves is religious in its indif- 
ference to reward, and sublime in its self-sacrifice of 
blessedness ? I call it ignoble to cease to work for life, 
to give up the hope of life, when life means the vital 
consciousness and vital action of continuous love. I 
call it suicide, not sacrifice, which abjures immortality 
and prefers annihilation. 

In the name of Christ I ask you not to be content 
with this chill phantom of religion, with this miscalled 
virtue of sacrifice, which calls upon you as its first duty 



39o 



The Afternoon of Life. 



to sacrifice your personality in God. That is to turn a 
virtue into % vice. 

The fact is you nave lost belief because- your past 
religion was borrowed too much from others, too much 
supported by the influence of another, too little the 
direct communion of your soul with its Father and its 
Educator. If you wish for perfection and are not 
content to die and love no more, the restoration of 
belief may be attained by the personal labour of the 
soul. Resolve to rely on none, to accept of no direction 
which will free you from the invigorating pain of effort. 
Meet your life and its inner questions for yourself alone 
with Him whose presence you dimly feel ; and strive 
for the highest, and let the highest be this — to live 
for ever in God that you may live "for ever to ex- 
pend yourself for man. Free yourself from the cant 
of infidelity. It boasts of love, it boasts of liberality. 
.Has it no sneer, has it no fanaticism? Its church 
is narrower than our strictest sect, its persecution, 
had it power, would rival that of the most virulent 
fanatic, unless the use it makes now of its only wea- 
pons, tongue and pen, be mere playfulness. Playfulness ! 
Why, the foremost characteristic of our present infidelity 
is an appalling absence of humour. No ; I do not find 
that denial of the faith produces the growth of charity, 
but the contrary, nor yet the growth of that delicate 
humour which goes with gentle laughter through the 
tangled difficulties of life, and conquers them by half 
disbelieving in them. 

It is worth trying what one personal effort to bring 
ourselves into the relation of a child to a father, in all 



The Restoration of Belief. 



391 



the naturalness and simplicity of thai relation, will do 
towards restoring faith and renewing life with tender- 
ness. For this has been the fault of the religion we 
have lost. This is why we lost it, that it was not simple 
enough. We were not receiving the kingdom of God 
as little children. We had encumbered its image with 
opinions of men which we had to defend, and in defend- 
ing them we ceased to see the simple kingdom of God. 
We involved it with the rites and ordinances and tra- 
ditions of a sect or a church, and when partisanship had 
chilled charity, we ceased to see its universality. We 
mixed up its simple elements with peculiar feelings of 
ecstasy and remorse, and of spiritual experiences which 
separated us from our fellows, and when these transient 
things died away we thought that the kingdom had also 
died. We placed it in the uncommon, the supernatural, 
the wondrous ; we thought it was a blessing given to few. 
We forgot that all great and living things are common, 
natural, and only not wondrous because custom has 
blinded our eyes. The air we breathe is everywhere — 
the sun pours ou t his light and heat in universal pro- 
fusion. And the kingdom of God is as universal as the 
air and sunlight, is bound up with no particular church, 
and demands no feelings unnatural to man. It is of 
God, but it is for men. It rests in its heavenly place 
far above the fret and fume of contending opinions, but 
in the midst also of the heart of mankind. It reposes 
on a few simple truths — the Fatherhood of God ; the 
Sonhood of Mankind ; the redemption of all through 
educating love ; the communion of all with one another 
in the work of charity — truths so simple when they are 



392 



The A fternoon of Life, 



grasped, so fitted for the wisest and the poorest, so enno- 
bling in their impulse and their influence, so expansive 
to enfold and enlighten all the realms of hunian action 
and human feeling, that we are astonished that we have 
been blind so long, and at last cr y, our heart broken with 
a great joy, 6 My Father, make me a little child.' 

I know not whether we are yet wearied enongh in the 
times of early manhood to realise our childhood and His 
Fatherhood ; but when some years have passed, and 
brought with them the daily burden of life, it is a simple 
yet a wonderful comfort to have a second self which is 
a child ; to possess a childhood of feeling in the midst of 
manhood ; and when the work of the day is passed, to 
lay onr folded hands npon the knees of God as once we 
did npon onr mother's knee, and looking np to say, 
6 Our Father, which art in Heaven.' 



The Glory and Work of Old Age. 393 



THE GLORY AND WORK OF OLD AGE. 

'Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according- to thy 
word : for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.' — Luke ii. 29, 30. 

The greatness of man is chiefly in this, that he can 
say to pain, I will endure ; and to death, I will conquer 
its fear ; and to old age, I will not be querulous — that 
he can say and do these things. 

The glory of man is chiefly in this, that Christ 
enables him to go beyond the Stoic, and to say to pain, 
I will not only endure but I will make suffering a step 
towards progress ; and to death, I will not only conquer 
its fear but open it as the portal of ampler life ; and 
to old age, I will not only not be querulous but will, 
therein and thereby, finish my inner development before 
I go — that he can say and do these things. 

To crystallise into finished perfection was the aim and 
the ideal of the Stoic. To grow for ever is the aim and the 
ideal of the Christian. Death ended the effort and the 
pain of the Stoic. Death continues the effort, without 
the pain, of the Christian. Perfection is then our object, 
and life our delight. "We know that both are inter- 
woven, that as the power of living increases, the ideal 
of perfection becomes higher ; that as we become more 
perfect, we become more enraptured with life and capable 
of greater pleasure in it. 



394 The Glory a7id Work of Old A ge. 

But before we enter on that delightful progress where 
the aspirations and the powers of the soul are equal, 
we have to pass through the parenthesis of life on 
earth, and win through pain, and weakness, and decay, 
the powers which will break into easy action in the life 
to come. We are here to win, not perfection, which 
we cannot reach, but as much maturity as is possible 
for us ; and on our ripening stage by stage in a pro- 
gressive and natural manner, depends our power of 
beginning at once in the world beyond, our race for- 
ward to perfect and more perfect things. 

Youth, like spring, has its own work, a work chiefly 
of faithful and pure reception of beauty and joy and 
goodness, and of enthusiastic delight in these. Man- 
hood, like summer, has its own work, the noble expres- 
sion in upright labour of the things received in youth. 
The later manhood passes, like autumn, through two 
phases — the phase of harvest, and the phase of entering 
decay. Its work is the storing up of the results of life, 
and afterwards such a resistance of the sadness which 
comes of having finished all external toil, that the soul 
may enter upon the winter of old age with the sense of 
beauty unimpaired, though changed ; with a quiet con- 
tentment in which the heart can fold its wings around 
itself and dwell within their soft and silver shadow; 
when life drops all its sails, like that worn-out .ship, 
which, after much beating on the seas, lets fall its 
anchor where lofty cliffs enclose a quiet haven. 

We have dwelt before on the Christian work of youth 
and manhood. We will speak to-day of the blessings 
and the work of age. There is no need to praise it 



The Glory and Work of Old Age, 395 



overmuch., to represent it, as some do, as a delightful 
time. The loss it brings with it is not delightful ; the 
wearing out of energies and faculties is not, and cannot 
be, a source of pleasure ; but if we have enjoyed our 
spring, and toiled through our summer, and half reaped 
and half dreamed through our autumn, and been faithful 
through all to manliness and to Grod, it is a miserable 
thing if we are to be conquered by decay at last, and 
when winter comes sit wailing over the dying embers of 
the fires of life. 

The representation which, our latest poet has given 
of the sorrowful and hopeless sadness of old age, of the 
pain of its retrospect because the joy and passion of life 
can never be felt again, of the sad desire of death and 
rest, without any security of life to be — but even so, of 
the desire for death because life has now no interest — is 
a strange contrast to this noble Jewish hymn, which, 
uttered by a man of many years, lias thrilled through- 
out the ages to this time, and stirred by its sacred and 
fine humanity in old men's hearts a quiet energy and 
a tranquillising hope. There is in it not sorrow, but the 
conquest of sorrow ; not the pain of retrospect, but the 
prophetic joy ; not the bitterness, but the peace and 
hope of death ; not the decay of interest in the world, 
but unabated hope for his country, and a vision of 
redemption for others than his countrymen; not the 
seeing of sadness, but the seeing of salvation. If the 
only message which modern poetry has to bring to old 
age be the same effeminate tone which characterised 
the poems of one only among the Greek lyrists, we had 
better, when the hairs grow grey upon our heads, turn 



396 The Glory and Work of Old Age. 

from the message of this melancholy pipe, and listen to 
the manly notes of the mellow psaltery of Simeon, 
6 Lord, now lettest Thou thy servant depart in peace, 
for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.' 

What, then, were the gains which blessed this old 
man's age? The first was prophetic power; not so 
mnch the power of foretelling, as the power of insight 
into God's doings. He saw the child and he knew 
that it was the Saviour of the world : e mine eyes have 
seen Thy salvation.' And in a moment, before his inward 
sight, he beheld the sun of redemption rising in glor} r , 
not only over his own people, but in a light which 
should lighten the Gentiles also. 

This is the glory of a Christian's old age — vividness 
of spiritual vision. Memory is fading away, the power 
of reasoning clearly is departing, passion is chilled, the 
hand has lost its cunning, and the lips their eloquence, 
decay has touched all physical and intellectual life, but 
the spirit lives, and lives more vitally, more intensely 
than ever. It does its own peculiar work better than 
in youth and manhood. It sees more clearly into the 
life and realities of things. It has gained security of 
faith and hope for itself, and in all matters pertain- 
ing to the spiritual progress of mankind it sees into 
God's plans and rejoices in them. 

One does not speak vaguely in saying this. The 
biographies which record this strange victory over 
decay, this inner life, when all the rest of the man is at 
the point of death, are many. And they are found 
written, not only of the cultured and the strong in 
character, but of the poor, the ignorant, and the feeble- 



The Glory and Work of Old Age. 397 

minded. We do not find this in any philosophy or 
religion which has denied God and denied immortality j 
and we find this victoriousness more distinct and 
developed in Christianity than in Judaism. And more- 
over, this spiritual power grows stronger in propor- 
tion to the decay of the other powers, for earthly 
passion and aims cloud the heavenly horizon, the 
tyranny of the understanding contends against the 
claims of faith, and the perfect health of the body makes 
this life too precious to permit much contemplation of 
the other. 

I do not speak against these things, for youthful 
passion, and the exercise of the understanding, and ex- 
quisite health are natural, and we ought to work out 
their good ; but if they are all, what have we left when 
they decay ? Nothing ! according to a modern theory — 
everything ! according to the Christian thought. Their 
passing away gives room for the expansion of the 
spirit. This, then, is the primary gain of old age. But 
it does not come into our possession unless we toil for 
it. If life and its work, and the world and its pursuits, 
lead us into forgetfulness of God and neglect of our 
spirit, then, when old age comes, the spirit has not 
got beyond the stage of infancy. It tries to expand, 
but it has never been fed, never educated, and it 
cannot do its work. But Simeon's intuitive vision 
came of a life of previous holiness. He had waited 
for the revelation of God's salvation, and waiting 
meant a life lived with that expectation at its root. 
In the midst of the work and turmoil of life he had 
grown more and more like to God 3 and likeness of 



398 The Glory and Work of Old Age. 

character to God gave liiin prophetic insight into God's 
plans for the race, and now, when the hour of out- 
ward decay had come, his spirit, which had put forth 
stem, and branch, and leaves, in natural progress, sud- 
denly flowered. 

I would that we could so prepare ourselves for age 
that we might remember in the inspiration of youth 
as in the labour of manhood, that the time is coming 
when our whole life will be dependent on the power of 
spiritual being in us, and remembering this, labour to 
train the spirit into the likeness of Christ. For, 
will you have light or darkness by and by ; the power 
of vision in old age, or the impotency of regret ; the 
hope which maketh not ashamed, or the, effeminate 
despair ; the sight of the salvation of the Lord flowing 
in freshening tide over all men, or the sight of your 
own miserable decay usurping all the view? These 
things lie in your own hands. 

2. Another remarkable gain blessed the old age of 
•Simeon, the possession of a liberal religious view. We 
find the old man set free from the exclusiveness and 
bigotry of his time and of his youth. Those were 
strange words upon the lips of a Jew — c a light to 
lighten the Gentiles ! 9 They had been said before ; 
some, in the esoteric circle of the higher Judaism, were 
probably saying them now. But it was not a common 
thought, nor a national thought, at the time of Christ's 
coming. Those who heard Simeon would be likely to 
call him a dangerous Liberal. 

Some who hold the view that old age is bigoted in 
opinion, will be still more surprised. But after all, youth 



The Glory and Work of Old Age. 399 

is more narrow and intolerant than age. We call young 
men liberal because they give utterance to liberal 
opinions. But one may hold the truth in unrighteous- 
ness, and one may profess liberality in illiberality, and 
toler?aice in intolerance. Those religious or political 
liberals who are always thanking God that they are not 
as other men are, who consider themselves to be 
emancipated, and despise others, are not free from the 
charge of Pharisaism. Many young men wear their 
liberalism as they wear their clothes, and it no more 
belongs to their real self than their clothes do. Talk 
to them, and you will find that their abuse and con- 
tempt of those whom they call unenlightened and 
narrow is as one-sided and intolerant as that of the 
hottest of their opponents. But one should not blame 
them too much, for intolerance and one-sidedness are 
natural to youth. It has not enough experience to be 
many-sided, and a large charity is the growth of years, 
the last result of many trials. 

For this reason, tolerance and a wide religious view 
are natural to old age, and it is very pitiable when 
we find it without them. Experience of life and 
knowledge of men ought to soften down the harsh- 
ness of our youthful judgments. It is astonishing as 
we grow older, if we have grown in wisdom of love, 
how much good we discover in men whom we thought all 
wrong, how much we find our severity mistaken. We 
learn that fhere is a root of good at the centre of wrong 
opinions, and we seek to draw out that good. We 
learn not to judge acts till we are acquainted with 
the motives which prompted them, and rather to 



400 The Glory and Work of Old Age. 

believe all things good of men than to systematically 
distrust them. Nothing can be worse than the way in 
which persons who profess themselves to be liberal con- 
demn public men for turning back from liberal views, 
and publish their condemnation on the grounds of a 
single mistake or of a single speech, on which at least 
two opinions are possible. Common sense would lead 
one to think that a man does not reverse the acts 
and thoughts of a long life in a day. Charity would 
wait for further light upon the matter, but neither 
common sense nor charity can keep the eager enthu- 
siast for liberalism from proclaiming his liberality by 
an attack upon the man who has made a slip for the 
first time. He pounces at once upon the wound and 
tears it open. I think that hateful. 

We leave this sort of thing behind as we grow older. 
But even then we do not lose it unless there has been 
charity at the root of our early harshness. There is a 
severity of judgment which comes of eager love that 
men should be right, there is a severity which comes 
of eager desire that we should be proved right. It is 
the former only which ripens into the wise tenderness 
of age. 

Again, there is an indifference as to what men believe 
and do, which is often mistaken for breadth of view. 
It does not ripen into true tolerance in age, but into 
contempt of men. For its root is not charity, but the 
idleness which is too slothful to form opiniofis, idleness 
whose root is selfishness. 

The true liberality of old age is not this indifference. 
It is gained by the entrance of the soul into the large 



The Glory and Work of Old Age. 



401 



region of the love of God, by deeper communion 
with the infinite variety of the character of Christ. 
Hence the old man, at one with simple and majestic 
principles, passes by the transient forms into which 
ideas are thrown by religious men, and looks for the 
spirit in which men work, and judges them by that ; 
hence he lays aside the outside peculiarities of men's 
characters which would have jarred him in youth, and 
searches directly for the motives and ideas of the 
character ; hence the temporary currents on the sur- 
face of public affairs, and the local outbursts of evil, do 
not much cloud his view of the fortunes of Man ; he 
looks deeper, and sees the vast main current sweeping 
towards God, he finds beneath the evil the infinite foun- 
tain of good. The evils and sufferings of the world lose 
their harsh outlines, and their dread, and pain, and are 
placed in the inner light of thought. They are there 
seen along with the good and joy of the world, till at 
last the vision of the great whole dawns upon the soul, 
and the man learns to see God moving as a spirit 
in all history, and Christ endeavouring in all men's 
hearts. 

Then he can bend his head to the blow of death, not 
in bitterness of anger that humanity has failed, not in 
selfish indifference to the welfare of mankind, but in a 
sweet contentment that all things are working together 
for good, that the Mankind for which and with which 
he has worked and suffered like a brother, may be left 
with perfect confidence in the hands of perfect love, 
that salvation has come and is coming unto all, not only 
to favoured, but to neglected races ; for to him the spirit 
IS 



402 The Glory and Work of Old Age. 

of Simeon's phrase is ever true, that Christ is a light to 
lighten the Gentiles, as well as the glory of his people 
Israel. 

So he wins the crowning blessing of old age — deep 
peace. 6 Lord, now lettest Thou thy servant depart in 
peace, according to thy word.' 

We cannot win that till just before the close. We 
long for rest to our unquiet heart and brain, all through 
the later days of youth. We must not have it then ; 
for had we not our restlessness, how should we overcome 
the natural slothfulness of youth? We desire in a 
more passionate way, in our manhood, for rest from 
the burden of this world ; for some relief from the 
torrent of anger, and doubt, and passion, and thought, 
which, far deeper and more impetuous than ever in 
youth, sweeps over the fields of the heart— whenever 
toil, relaxed for a moment, gives us leave, in the slumber 
of the will, to feel our wants and to question our destiny. 
But there is no peace for us then. We must work 
out our own thought, and that in solitude, for we 
have passed by the time when, as in youth, we could j 
seek for sympathy in these things, and entrust our 
secrets to another. And the pain and the battle grow 
heavier and heavier as life gets nearer to old age, 
for day by day we lose the force which enabled us to 
distract ourselves in toil. Day by day the inward pain 
is increased by the outward effort to recall decaying 
energy. It is our duty to wage the battle to the end, 
and our best comfort, apart from Christ, is that not to 
wage it, and to give in, is worse than to go _on. But,y 
if God be true, and Christianity be not a dream, every 



The Glory and Woj'k of Old Age. 403 

hour of the fight is storing up in us the capabilities 
of active peace when the warfare is accomplished. 
It is these capabilities which begin to rise within us 
into victory over restlessness when old age has come. 
We can contend no more — we have scarcely anything left 
to contend against ; we have slain all our foes in the 
power of Christ ; we have exhausted all our doubts ; and 
as the clouds disperse, the star of hope rises soft and 
clear in the pale pure light of the heavenly dawn. "We 
look on it, and are at rest ; we lay down our armour ; 
we lie back contented in the arms of God. We whisper, 
humbly, with S. Paul, ' I have fought the good fight.' 
We know that the dawn-star of hope will melt away 
when the sun rises on our new life, but it will melt in 
the light of absolute realisation. We have seen, at 
last, God's salvation, and we cry with Simeon, 6 Lord, 
now lettest Thou thy servant depart in peace.' 

This, then, is what we are and what we receive from 
God, as age draws on. This is the result of the work 
of God upon us. 

But is there no personal business which we ourselves 
are bound to do in age ? This is our last subject, the 
special work of age. It is partly outward, partly in- 
ward. 

Its outward work is the spreading of charity. Old 
age should radiate charity from it, till the atmosphere 
of the whole household and the society in which it lives 
be warm with its gracious influence. Men, women, and 
children should feel softened, and be bettered, by the 
presence of its kindliness. 

Again, it is the usage of experience for the help of 



404 The Glory and W ork of. Old Age. 

others. Age should not surrender from weariness of 
life its right of giving sympathy, its power of forming 
in its calm, and from its long experience, wise judgments 
for the troubled lives of others. It ought not to claim 
its infirmity as a reason for harshness, or for want of 
tender interest. And that it may be able to do the 
good I mention, and to avoid the evil, it ought as much 
as possible to live with the young. Else its tendency is 
to be absorbed in its own weaknesses and wants ; to 
lose interest in the actual movements of the world, and 
especially in those movements which are initiated by 
the young, which, though sometimes ill-considered 
and foolish, are yet the germs of that which will be, 
and have at least the one important quality of life. 
Next to the sad spectacle of seeing a young man mock 
the wisdom and despise the warnings of old age, is the 
spectacle of an old man who has only indifference for 
the enthusiasm and contempt for the ideas of the 
young. 

The inward work of age is, however, the most impor- 
tant. After a time, the outward influence of which I 
have spoken becomes less and less ; less direct at least, 
more indirect. The old man, the old woman, becoming 
weaker, and unable to share in earthly things, retire into 
their inner being, and live there a wonderful and vivid 
life. It is often said that we know not all the strange 
solitary life of children. I do not know if we think 
enough of the stranger and more solitary life which fills 
the heart of age. More solitary in the present, but oh, 
how peopled with the past ! What vivid dreams, what 
memories of enthusiasm^ of scenes where young love 



The Glory and Work of Old Age. 405 

moved in luminous air, of early sorrows, of dramas in 
which life concentrated itself for a few months into 
tragedy or comedy; what recollections of friendships 
which sailed with us over the ocean of life, and there 
sank or parted, but left with us new feelings, new 
thoughts, sweet tendernesses, dearer now than ever to 
the silent heart. What holier memories too are ours, 
when, in the calm of age, we look back to the place 
where God first touched our heart, and we set up our 
Bethel in its plain ; where the blessedness of forgive- 
ness in Christ, and the love of Christ, first made us 
new ; when, as we went on, temptation met us and He 
enabled us to conquer, or, if we failed, to begin again ; 
when we grew divinely conscious of an inner Spirit 
with us, and that assurance of eternal life began which 
years have only deepened. Oh ! none are less alone, 
none have a more sweet and vivid life, than many a 
silent man and woman in the years of age. 

And here we touch on one portion of the inner work 
which old age has to do — the edifying of the heart in 
noble religion by consideration of the past. Fate cannot 
rob the old of remembrance : the memory of love and 
joy, of friendship and companionship, is always sweet ; 
and if the memory be one of sorrow, one may still not be 
unhappy if the sorrow has become an intimate part of 
life, cherished for its results and for the tenderness with 
which it was linked — since now the pain of it has gone 
with the decay of passion. One by one the events of 
life are traced in quiet retrospection, one by one they 
fall into a kind of religious order; their causes are 
seen, their meaning, and their relation to one another 



406 The Glory and Work of Old Age. 

and to the whole of life ; till at last the conviction that 
a Father has been leading him all his life long is fixed 
in the old man's mind. He sees that everything in the 
past has been ripening him, that he has been made 
slowly more complete. Then breaks upon him as never 
before the assurance of immortality. 'Can this long 
work of God's be for nought ? can this education, every 
hour of which was weighty with meaning, end in the 
grave ? Is my spirit, at the very moment when it is 
most conscious of completion, nearest to extinction ? It 
is impossible.' 

Thus does life in the past confirm faith in the 
Fatherhood of God, and make an immortal future real. 
Thus, in spiritual brooding over past and future, the 
experience of the one and the faith in the other unite 
in one divine and glorious hope. 

Once more. The inward work of old age consists in 
rounding the soul into as great perfection as possible, 
in filling up the broken edges of the sphere of life, in 
consolidating the world of our ideas. When we reach 
old age, we are conscious, if we are desirous of per- 
fection, of a certain absence of finish in our qualities 
and in our Christian graces. It is vain to say that 
this consciousness implies a diseased self-introspec- 
tion. For introspection which would be morbid in 
youth and manhood is natural to old age. Unless 
inordinately indulged in,. no evils follow from it then. 
The old man must live much alone. He cannot 
do better than prayerfully seek to fulfil what is yet 
wanting in his faith, in his charity, in his holiness — 
drawing nearer and nearer to conformity with his 



The Glory and Work of .Old Age. 407 

Saviour and his friend ; making himself, through his 
daily companionship with the Spirit of God, more ready 
for the everlasting life with God. 

Nor can he do better than consolidate and harmonise, 
into a whole the ideas he has gained in life. Many are 
useless — these he will reject ; many are noble, and have 
on them the impress of eternity — these he will return to 
and dwell on till they become interwoven with his 
being, possessions for ever. For ideas belong to the 
spiritual nature. All else will.be left behind us when 
we die ; but these endure, these we shall take with us. 
Let us watch and work, that our eternal companions 
be worthy of us and of the life to come. No aim in 
old age can be nobler than to arrive at death with a 
spirit enriched and matured by the possession of puri- 
fied ideas. ~No aim in youth and manhood can be 
better than the winning of them. 

From this sort of work arises a clear spiritual activity 
entirely independent of outward decay. It belongs to the 
inner life ; it does not weary like intellectual activity ; 
it is more like the easy breathing of a clear atmosphere 
than any strenuous labour. In it the mind is cheerful 
and hopeful. It blends easily with every emotion, and 
heightens emotion without the pain of excitement. In 
itself it has an arranging power, so that life harmonised 
under its influence is seen as a well-ordered landscape 
on which the sun of God's love is shining. In wonder, 
and in joy that he has been so cared for, and so led 
into maturity, all thought of self passes from the old 
man's life, and he throws his whole being in gratitude at 
the feet of his Saviour and his God. It is, in fact, the 



408 The Glory and Work of Old Age. 

first touch, even before death, of the pure and perfect 
life, the first faint throb of the exquisite existence into 
which he is going to enter, the half-realisation on the 
borders of the world of light, while yet within the 
glimmering shadow, of what communion with God may 
mean. Then indeed he feels what Simeon felt when 
the long-repressed cry rose to his lips, for he sees the 
very Christ : fi Lord, now lettest Thou thy servant 
depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salva- 
tion.' 



1 



PRIMARY TRUTHS OF RELIGION. 

By Right Rey. THOMAS M. CLARK, D. D., LL. D., 

BISUOP OF RHODE ISLAND. 

1 vol,, 12mo. Price, $1.00. 

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"We welcome this book fijom the pen of an American Bishop. Dr. Clark has done 
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" The author of this valuable little work is a distinguished Bishop of the Protes- 
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men. It is calm and judicial. It states opposing views with great fairness ; it takes 
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